ost
dejected of wretches, when, having forfeited his life for treason, he was
led with all the cruel parade of preparation, and surrounding guards, to
the scaffold.

The poet says well:

'Tis not the stoic lesson, got by rote,
The pomp of words, and pedant dissertation,
That can support us in the hour of terror.
Books have taught cowards to talk nobly of it:
But when the trial comes, they start, and stand aghast.

Very true: for then it is the old man in the fable, with his bundle of
sticks.

The lady is well read in Shakspeare, our English pride and glory; and
must sometimes reason with herself in his words, so greatly expressed,
that the subject, affecting as it is, cannot produce any thing greater.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible, warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice:
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
Or blown, with restless violence, about
The pendant worlds; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and uncertain thought
Imagines howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loaded worldly life,
That pain, age, penury, and imprisonment,
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.----

I find, by one of thy three letters, that my beloved had some account
from Hickman of my interview with Miss Howe, at Col. Ambrose's. I had a
very agreeable time of it there; although severely rallied by several of
the assembly. It concerns me, however, not a little, to find our affair
so generally known among the flippanti of both sexes. It is all her own
fault. There never, surely, was such an odd little soul as this.--Not to
keep her own secret, when the revealing of it could answer no possible
good end; and when she wants not (one would think) to raise to herself
either pity or friends, or to me enemies, by the proclamation!--Why,
Jack, must not all her own sex laugh in their sleeves at her weakness?
what would become of the peace of the world, if all women should take it
into their heads to follow her example? what a fine time of it would the
heads of families have? Their wives always filling their ears with their
confessions; their daughters with theirs: sisters would be every day
setting their