ethods we are fallen into,
without attempting to deliver ourselves from the tyranny under which we
are reduced by such innovations. Of all the laudable motives of human
life, none has suffered so much in this kind as love; under which
revered name, a brutal desire called lust is frequently concealed and
admitted; though they differ as much as a matron from a prostitute, or a
companion from a buffoon. Philander[463] the other day was bewailing
this misfortune with much indignation, and upbraided me for having some
time since quoted those excellent lines of the satirist:

_To an exact perfection they have brought
The action love, the passion is forgot._[464]

"How could you," said he, "leave such a hint so coldly? How could
Aspasia[465] and Sempronia[466] enter into your imagination at the same
time, and you never declare to us the different reception you gave them?
The figures which the ancient mythologists and poets put upon love and
lust in their writings, are very instructive. Love is a beauteous blind
child, adorned with a quiver and a bow, which he plays with, and shoots
around him, without design or direction; to intimate to us, that the
person beloved has no intention to give us the anxieties we meet with;
but that the beauties of a worthy object are like the charms of a lovely
infant: they cannot but attract your concern and fondness, though the
child so regarded is as insensible of the value you put upon it, as it
is that it deserves your benevolence. On the other side, the sages
figured Lust in the form of a satyr; of shape, part human, part bestial;
to signify, that the followers of it prostitute the reason of a man to
pursue the appetites of a beast. This satyr is made to haunt the paths
and coverts of the wood-nymphs and shepherdesses, to lurk on the banks
of rivulets, and watch the purling streams (as the resorts of retired
virgins), to show, that lawless desire tends chiefly to prey upon
innocence, and has something so unnatural in it, that it hates its own
make, and shuns the object it loved, as soon as it has made it like
itself. Love therefore is a child that complains and bewails its
inability to help itself, and weeps for assistance, without an immediate
reflection of knowledge of the food it wants: Lust, a watchful thief
which seizes its prey, and lays snares for its own relief; and its
principal object being innocence, it never robs, but it murders at the
same time. From this idea of a Cupi