itself. Here, indeed,
my brother deduces all the revolutions among men from the passion of
love; and in his preface, answers that usual observation against us,
that there is no quarrel without a woman in it, with a gallant
assertion, that there is nothing else worth quarrelling for. My brother
is of a complexion truly amorous; all his thoughts and actions carry in
them a tincture of that obliging inclination; and this turn has opened
his eyes to see, we are not the inconsiderable creatures which unlucky
pretenders to our favour would insinuate. He observes that no man begins
to make any tolerable figure, till he sets out with the hopes of
pleasing some one of us. No sooner he takes that in hand, but he pleases
every one else by-the-bye. It has an immediate effect upon his
behaviour. There is Colonel Ranter, who never spoke without an oath,
till he saw the Lady Betty Modish;[164] now never gives his man an
order, but it is, "Pray, Tom, do it." The drawers where he drinks live
in perfect happiness. He asked Will at the "George" the other day how he
did? Where he used to say, "Damn it, it is so," he now believes there is
some mistake: he must confess, he is of another opinion; but however he
won't insist.

Every temper, except downright insipid, is to be animated and softened
by the influence of beauty: but of this untractable sort is a lifeless
handsome fellow that visits us, whom I have dressed at this twelvemonth;
but he is as insensible of all the arts I use, as if he conversed all
that time with his nurse. He outdoes our whole sex in all the faults our
enemies impute to us; he has brought laziness into an opinion, and makes
his indolence his philosophy: insomuch, that no longer ago than
yesterday in the evening he gave me this account of himself: "I am,
madam, perfectly unmoved at all that passes among men, and seldom give
myself the fatigue of going among them; but when I do, I always appear
the same thing to those whom I converse with. My hours of existence, or
being awake, are from eleven in the morning to eleven at night; half of
which I live to myself, in picking my teeth, washing my hands, paring my
nails, and looking in the glass. The insignificancy of my manners to the
rest of the world makes the laughers call me a _quidnunc_, a phrase I
shall never inquire what they mean by it. The last of me each night is
at St. James's Coffee-house, where I converse, yet never fall into a
dispute on any occasion, but leave