not that the female sex was indifferent to him: yet such was the
apparent caution with which he spoke to the virtuous wife and innocent
daughter, that few knew he ever addressed himself to females. He had,
however, the reputation of a winning tongue; and whether it was that
it even overcame the dread of his singular character, or that they
were moved by his apparent hatred of vice, he was as often among those
females who form the boast of their sex from their domestic virtues,
as among those who sully it by their vices.

About the same time, there came to London a young gentleman of the
name of Aubrey: he was an orphan left with an only sister in the
possession of great wealth, by parents who died while he was yet in
childhood. Left also to himself by guardians, who thought it their
duty merely to take care of his fortune, while they relinquished the
more important charge of his mind to the care of mercenary subalterns,
he cultivated more his imagination than his judgment. He had, hence,
that high romantic feeling of honour and candour, which daily ruins so
many milliners' apprentices. He believed all to sympathise with
virtue, and thought that vice was thrown in by Providence merely for
the picturesque effect of the scene, as we see in romances: he thought
that the misery of a cottage merely consisted in the vesting of
clothes, which were as warm, but which were better adapted to the
painter's eye by their irregular folds and various coloured patches.
He thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of
life. He was handsome, frank, and rich: for these reasons, upon his
entering into the gay circles, many mothers surrounded him, striving
which should describe with least truth their languishing or romping
favourites: the daughters at the same time, by their brightening
countenances when he approached, and by their sparkling eyes, when he
opened his lips, soon led him into false notions of his talents and
his merit. Attached as lie was to the romance of his solitary hours,
he was startled at finding, that, except in the tallow and wax candles
that flickered, not from the presence of a ghost, but from want of
snuffing, there was no foundation in real life for any of that
congeries of pleasing pictures and descriptions contained in those
volumes, from which he had formed his study. Finding, however, some
compensation in his gratified vanity, he was about to relinquish his
dreams, when the extraordinary bei