gh every grade of society, and, unlike that wreath which
usually decks the gallant soldier's brow, a cypress chaplet binds the
early gray, and makes admonitory signal of the ill-spent past. The
wrongs of an injured ~227~~and confiding husband, whose fortunes,
wrecked by the false seducer, have left him a prey to shattered ruin,
yet live in the remembrance of some honest Cheltenham hearts; and
although these may feel for the now abandoned object of his illicit
passion, there are but few who, while they drop a tear of pity as she
passes them daily in the street, do not invoke a nobler feeling of
indignation upon the ruthless head of him who forged the shafts of
misery, and pierced at one fell blow the hearts of husband, wife, and
children! What father that has read Maria's hapless tale of woe,
and marked the progress of deceptive vice, will hereafter hazard the
reputation of his daughters by suffering them to mix in Cheltenham
society with the branded seducer and his profligate associates?
Gallantry, an unrestricted love of the fair sex, and a predilection
for variety, may all be indulged in this country to any extent, without
betraying confidence on the one hand or innocence upon the other,
without outraging decency, or violating the established usages of
society. While the profligate confines his sensual pleasures with such
objects as I allude to within the walls of his harem, the moralist has
no right to trespass upon his privacy; it is only when they are blazoned
forth to public view, and daringly opposed to public scorn, that the
lash of the satirist is essentially useful, if not in correcting, at
least in exposing the systematic seducer, and putting the inexperienced
and the virtuous on their guard against the practice of profligacy. It
is the frequency and notoriety of such scenes that has at last alarmed
the Chelts, who, fearing more for their suffering interests than for
their suffering fellow-creatures, begin to murmur rather loudly against
the Berkeley Adonis, representing that the town itself suffers in
respectability and increase of visitors, by its being known as the
rendezvous of the bloods and blacks of Berkeley. The truth of this
assertion may be gathered from the ~228~~following _jeu d' esprit_, only
one among a hundred of such squibs that have been very freely circulated
in Cheltenham and the neighbourhood within the last year.

'NEWS FROM CHELTENHAM.

'The season runs smartly in Ch