llies
of his patients; he was recommended from family to family; the fees began
to multiply; a variety of footmen appeared every day at his door; he
discontinued his sham circuit, and looking upon the present conjuncture,
as that tide in his affairs, which, according to Shakespeare, when taken
at the full, leads on to fortune, he resolved that the opportunity should
not be lost, and applied himself with such assiduity to his practice,
that, in all likelihood, he would have carried the palm from all his
contemporaries, had he not split upon the same rock which had shipwrecked
his hopes before.

We have formerly descanted upon that venereal appetite which glowed in
the constitution of our adventurer, and with all his philosophy and
caution could hardly keep within bounds. The reader, therefore, will not
be much surprised to learn, that, in the exercise of his profession, he
contracted an intimacy with a clergyman's wife, whom he attended as a
physician, and whose conjugal virtue he subdued by a long and diligent
exertion of his delusive arts, while her mind was enervated by sickness,
and her husband abroad upon his necessary occasions. This unhappy
patient, who was a woman of an agreeable person and lively conversation,
fell a sacrifice to her own security and self-conceit; her want of health
had confined her to a sedentary life, and her imagination being active
and restless, she had spent those hours in reading which other young
women devote to company and diversion, but, as her studies were not
superintended by any person of taste, she had indulged her own fancy
without method or propriety. The Spectator taught her to be a critic and
philosopher; from plays she learned poetry and wit, and derived her
knowledge of life from books of history and adventures. Fraught with
these acquisitions, and furnished by nature with uncommon vivacity, she
despised her own sex, and courted the society of men, among whom she
thought her talents might be more honourably displayed, fully confident
of her own virtue and sagacity, which enabled her to set all their arts
at defiance.

Thus qualified, she, in an evil hour, had recourse to the advice of our
adventurer, for some ailment under which she had long laboured, and found
such relief from his skill as very much prepossessed her in his favour.
She was no less pleased with his obliging manners than with his physic,
and found much entertainment in his conversation, so that the
acquain