Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/134

118 clever in selecting, or with a worse motive. The purse waxes empty, or its strings become rigid with use. Pleasures like these, (if indeed they are so) pall upon the palate and vitiate by their very odour. No delicacy, no sentiment, no soul, takes part in the carousal; and the indigestion, the flatulencies of love, regurgitate upon the palate, even to nauseousness.

Our readers, who are novices, will possibly be surprised to hear, that many of those High-flyers, though they keep, or job, a coach, and livery servants, can swear a good round stave as any fish-fag at Billingsgate; some have more taste for that than for prayers: how unlike ladies of the same occupation in some foreign countries! The charming Miss Shaw, for instance, can say worse things about her eyes, &c. (sparkle they never so bright), than ever was said about the Duke of Mh's penchant for her.

Many are the gradations from that highest degree of prostitution, down to the trulls that parade the streets by day; and one or two more steps, still, include those who keep out all night. In the latter dark offenders the conduct is so glaring, their robberies so soon unveil themselves, and the men are so disgusted, that less personal harm comes of them, than of those which begin