 they
indispensably recur with, in a narrative of which that PRACTICE professedly
composes the whole basis. I must therefore trust to the candour of your
judgment, for your allowing for the disadvantage I am necessarily under in that
respect, and to your imagination and sensibility, the pleasing task of repairing
it by their supplements, where my descriptions flag or fail: the one will
readily place the pictures I present before your eyes; the other give life to
the colours where they are dull, or worn with too frequent handling.
    What you say besides, by way of encouragement, concerning the extreme
difficulty of continuing so long in one strain, in a mean temper'd with taste,
between the revoltingness of gross, rank and vulgar expressions, and the
ridicule of mincing metaphors and affected circumlocutions, is so sensible, as
well as good-natur'd, that you greatly justify me to myself for my compliance
with a curiosity that is to be satisfied so extremely at my expense.
    Resuming now where I broke off in my last, I am in my way to remark to you
that it was late in the evening before I arriv'd at my new lodgings, and Mrs.
Cole, after helping me to range and secure my things, spent the whole evening
with me in my apartment, where we supped together, in giving me the best advice
and instruction with regard to this new stage of my profession I was now to
enter upon; and passing thus from a private devotee to pleasure into a public
one, to become a more general good, with all the advantages requisite to put my
person out to use, either for interest or pleasure, or both. But then, she
observ'd, as I was a kind of new face upon the town, that it was an established
rule, and part of trade, for me to pass for a maid, and dispose of myself as
such on the first good occasion, without prejudice, however, to such diversions
as I might have a mind to in the interim; for that nobody could be a greater
enemy than she was to the losing of time. That she would, in the mean time, do
her best to find out a proper person, and would undertake to manage this nice
point for me, if I would accept of her aid and advice to such good purpose that,
in the loss of a fictitious maidenhead, I should reap all the advantages of a
native one.
    Though such a delicacy of sentiments did not extremely belong to my
character at that time, I confess, against myself, that I perhaps too
