follows the sense of others, must be constant, as long as a woman can make advances.  The visits I make, the entertainments I give, and the addresses I receive, will be all arguments for me with a man of Frisk’s second-hand genius; but would be so many bars to my happiness with any other man.  However, since Frisk can wait, I shall enjoy a summer or two longer, and remain a single woman, in the sublime pleasure of being followed and admired; which nothing can equal, except that of being beloved by you.

“I am, &c.”

Will’s Coffee-house, May 30.

My chief business here this evening was to speak to my friends in behalf of honest Cave Underhill,[259] who has been a comic for three generations:  my father[260] admired him extremely when he was a boy.  There is certainly nature excellently represented in his manner of action; in which he ever avoided that general fault in players, of doing too much.  It must be confessed, he has not the merit of some ingenious persons now on the stage, of adding to his authors; for the actors were so dull in the last age, that many of them have gone out of the world, without having ever spoke one word of their own in the theatre.  Poor Cave is so mortified, that he quibbles, and tells you, he pretends only to act a part fit for a man who has one foot in the grave; viz., a gravedigger.  All admirers of true comedy, it is hoped, will have the gratitude to be present on the last day of his acting, who, if he does not happen to please them, will have it even then to say, that it is his first offence.

But there is a gentleman here, who says he has it from good hands, that there is actually a subscription made by many persons of wit and quality, for the encouragement of new comedies.  This design will very much contribute to the improvement and diversion of the town:  but as every man is most concerned for himself, I, who am of a saturnine and melancholy complexion, cannot but murmur, that there is not an equal invitation to write tragedies, having by me, in my book of commonplaces, enough to enable me to finish a very sad one by the 5th of next month.  I have the farewell of a general, with a truncheon in his hand, dying for love, in six lines.  I have the principles of a politician (who does all the mischief in the play) together with his declaration on the vanity of ambition in his last moments, expressed in a page and a half.  I have all my oaths ready, and my similes want nothing but application.  I won’t pretend to give you an account of the plot, it being the same design upon which all tragedies have been writ for several years last past; and from the beginning of the first scene, the frequenters of the house may know, as well as the author, when the battle is to be fought, the lady to yield, and the hero to proceed to his wedding and coronation.  Besides these advantages which I have in readiness, I have an eminent tragedian very much my friend, who shall come in, and go through the whole five acts, without troubling me for one sentence, whether he is to kill or be killed, love or be loved, win battles or lose them, or whatever other tragical performance I shall please to assign him.