ses upon him.

I shall go on Monday to a kind of ball, to which Colonel Ambrose has
invited me. It is given on a family account. I care not on what: for
all that delights me in the thing is, that Mrs. and Miss Howe are to be
there;--Hickman, of course; for the old lady will not stir abroad without
him. The Colonel is in hopes that Miss Arabella Harlowe will be there
likewise; for all the men and women of fashion round him are invited.

I fell in by accident with the Colonel, who I believe, hardly thought I
would accept of the invitation. But he knows me not, if he thinks I am
ashamed to appear at any place, where women dare show their faces. Yet
he hinted to me that my name was up, on Miss Harlowe's account. But, to
allude to one of Lord M.'s phrases, if it be, I will not lie a bed when
any thing joyous is going forward.

As I shall go in my Lord's chariot, I would have had one of my cousins
Montague to go with me: but they both refused: and I shall not choose to
take either of thy brethren. It would look as if I thought I wanted a
bodyguard: besides, one of them is too rough, the other too smooth, and
too great a fop for some of the staid company that will be there; and for
me in particular. Men are known by their companions; and a fop [as
Tourville, for example] takes great pains to hang out a sign by his dress
of what he has in his shop. Thou, indeed, art an exception; dressing
like a coxcomb, yet a very clever fellow. Nevertheless so clumsy a beau,
that thou seemest to me to owe thyself a double spite, making thy
ungracefulness appear the more ungraceful, by thy remarkable tawdriness,
when thou art out of mourning.

I remember, when I first saw thee, my mind laboured with a strong puzzle,
whether I should put thee down for a great fool, or a smatterer in wit.
Something I saw was wrong in thee, by thy dress. If this fellow, thought
I, delights not so much in ridicule, that he will not spare himself, he
must be plaguy silly to take so much pains to make his ugliness more
conspicuous than it would otherwise be.

Plain dress, for an ordinary man or woman, implies at least modesty, and
always procures a kind quarter from the censorious. Who will ridicule a
personal imperfection in one that seems conscious, that it is an
imperfection? Who ever said an anchoret was poor? But who would spare
so very absurd a wrong-head, as should bestow tinsel to make his
deformity the more conspicuous?

But, although I