Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/153

Rh as Burns rightly tells of Tam O'Shanter. Next they go to the play-house, and you accompany them; you squire them to Vauxhall, and your business is done. You are either attached like an heirloom to the house, become a sot, and make room in half a year for a similar dupe; or else, what is worse, you marry a, who has "tried it on" with a dozen or two, and insists upon her virtue being uncontaminated, because she has never been but in company of gentlemen of the house.

Every body must recollect the pother and runnings after there were in 1816, of a handsome landlady, in Bacon Street, Spitalfields; and yet she was not handsome either; her chief forte lay in looking agreeable, and pleasing the foolish part of our sex, without saying much, giving each one to understand that he was the first in her esteem. At least this was visible to us when she lived in Cow-cross; and, it is to be presumed, she carried the same guileful (though guiltless) arts to her new house. We never went to the latter, being already down to the hoax.

Servant maids in general (we might say universally) are upon the look-out for sweethearts, and husbands; and indeed, this we may say of the whole sex; but here we have nothing to do with