repair the breaches, that the hand of wintry time had made in his spirits
and his constitution. The reader will be pleased to recollect, that he had
already laid siege to the heart of the gentle Sophia. He now prosecuted
his affair with more alacrity than ever.

Alas, my dear readers! while we have been junketting along from
Southampton to Oxford, from Oxford to Windsor, and from Windsor to
Southampton back again, such is the miserable fate of human kind! Miss
Amelia Wilhelmina Cranley, the most pious of her sex, the flower of Mr.
Whitfield's converts, the wonder and admiration of Roger the cobler, has
given up the ghost. You will please then, in what follows, to represent to
yourselves the charms of Sophia as decked and burnished with a suit of
sables. Her exterior indeed was sable and gloomy, but her heart was far
superior to the attacks of wayward fate. She sat aloft in the region of
philosophy. She steeled her heart with the dignity of republicanism; for
her to drop one tear of sorrow would have been an eternal disgrace.

About this time--it was perhaps in reality a manoeuvre to forward the
affair, to which she had no aversion at bottom, with the father of
Delia--that Miss Cranley gave a grand entertainment, at which were present
Mr. Hartley, Mr. Prattle, sir William Twyford, lord Martin, most of the
ladies we have already commemorated, and many others.

The repast was conducted with much solemnity. The masculine character of
the mind of Sophia had rendered her particularly attached to the grace of
action. When she drank the health of any of her guests, she accompanied it
with a most profound _conge_. When she invited them to partake of any
dish, she pointed towards it with her hand. This action might have served
to display a graceful arm, but, alas! upon hers the hand of time had been
making depredations, and it appeared somewhat coarse and discoloured.

After dinner, the lady of the house, as usual, turned the conversation
upon the subject of politics. She inveighed with much warmth against the
effeminacy and depravity of the modern times. We were slaves, and we
deserved to be so. In almost every country there now appeared a king, that
puppet pageant, that monster in creation, miserable itself, a combination
of every vice, and invented for the curse of human kind. "Where now," she
asked, "was the sternness and inflexibility of ancient story? Where was
that Junius, that stood and gazed in triumph upon the executi