This offence gives me occasion to express myself with the resentment I ought, on people who take liberties of speech before that sex of whom the honoured names of mother, daughter, and sister, are a part:  I had liked to have named wife in the number; but the senseless world are so mistaken in their sentiments of pleasure, that the most amiable term in human life is become the derision of fools and scorners.  My brother and I have at least fifty times quarrelled upon this topic.  I ever argue, that the frailties of women are to be imputed to the false ornaments which men of wit put upon our folly and coquetry.  He lays all the vices of men upon women’s secret approbation of libertine characters in them.  I did not care to give up a point; but now he is out of the way, I cannot but own I believe there is very much in what he asserted:  for if you will believe your eyes, and own, that the wickedest and the wittiest of them all marry one day or other, is it possible to believe, that if a man thought he should be for ever incapable of being received by a woman of merit and honour, he would persist in an abandoned way, and deny himself the possibility of enjoying the happiness of well-governed desires, orderly satisfactions, and honourable methods of life?  If our sex were wise, a lover should have a certificate from the last woman he served, how he was turned away, before he was received into the service of another:  but at present any vagabond is welcome, provided he promises to enter into our livery.  It is wonderful, that we will not take a footman without credentials from his last master; and in the greatest concern of life, we make no scruple of falling into a treaty with the most notorious offender in his behaviour against others.  But this breach of commerce between the sexes, proceeds from an unaccountable prevalence of custom, by which a woman is to the last degree reproachable for being deceived, and a man suffers no loss of credit for being a deceiver.  Since this tyrant humour has gained place, why are we represented in the writings of men in ill figures for artifice in our carriage, when we have to do with a professed impostor?  When oaths, imprecations, vows, and adorations, are made use of as words of course, what arts are not necessary to defend us from such as glory in the breach of them?  As for my part, I am resolved to hear all, and believe none of them; and therefore solemnly declare, no vow shall deceive me, but that of marriage:  for I am turned of twenty, and being of a small fortune, some wit, and (if I can believe my lovers and my glass) handsome, I have heard all that can be said towards my undoing, and shall therefore, for warning sake, give an account of the offers that have been made me, my manner of rejecting them, and my assistances to keep my resolution.  In the sixteenth year of my life, I fell into the acquaintance of a lady, extremely well known in this town for the quick advancement of her husband, and the honours and distinctions which