Play not against me my own acknowledged sensibilities, I desire thee.  Sensibilities, which at the same time that they contradict thy charge of an adamantine heart in thy friend, thou hadst known nothing of, had I not communicated them to thee.

If I ruin such a virtue, sayest thou!—­Eternal monotonist!—­Again; the most immaculate virtue may be ruined by men who have no regard to their honour, and who make a jest of the most solemn oaths, &c.  What must be the virtue that will be ruined without oaths?  Is not the world full of these deceptions?  And are not lovers’ oaths a jest of hundreds of years’ standing?  And are not cautions against the perfidy of our sex a necessary part of the female education?

I do intend to endeavour to overcome myself; but I must first try, if I cannot overcome this lady.  Have I not said, that the honour of her sex is concerned that I should try?

Whenever thou meetest with a woman of but half her perfections, thou wilt marry—­Do, Jack.

Can a girl be degraded by trials, who is not overcome?

I am glad that thou takest crime to thyself, for not endeavouring to convert the poor wretches whom others have ruined.  I will not recriminate upon thee, Belford, as I might, when thou flatterest thyself that thou never ruinedst the morals of any young creature, who otherwise would not have been corrupted—­the palliating consolation of an Hottentot heart, determined rather to gluttonize on the garbage of other foul feeders than to reform.—­But tell me, Jack, wouldst thou have spared such a girl as my Rosebud, had I not, by my example, engaged thy generosity?  Nor was my Rosebud the only girl I spared:—­When my power was acknowledged, who more merciful than thy friend?

      It is resistance that inflames desire,
      Sharpens the darts of love, and blows its fire. 
      Love is disarm’d that meets with too much ease;
      He languishes, and does not care to please.

The women know this as well as the men.  They love to be addressed with spirit: 

      And therefore ’tis their golden fruit they guard
      With so much care, to make profession hard.

Whence, for a by-reflection, the ardent, the complaisant gallant is so often preferred to the cold, the unadoring husband.  And yet the sex do not consider, that variety and novelty give the ardour and the obsequiousness; and that, were the rake as much used to them as the husband is, he would be [and is to his own wife, if married] as indifferent to their favours, as their husbands are; and the husband, in his turn, would, to another woman, be the rake.  Let the women, upon the whole, take this lesson from a Lovelace—­’Always to endeavour to make themselves as new to a husband, and to appear as elegant and as obliging to him, as they are desirous to appear to a lover, and actually were to him as such; and then the rake, which all women love, will last longer in the husband, than it generally does.’