which our mind and manners owe their most distinguished

lustre—that moral enamel, which both brightens and preserves.
If I should ever be happy enough to see a son of mine at a fit age to send abroad, I shall endeavour to find out a governor for him, qui a vecú; I mean one who, with a complete experience of the world, has both sense and virtue sufficient to detest vice, admire virtue, and yield indulgence to the foibles and irregularities of youth and inexperience; whose morality should exceed
" The fixed and settled rules,
" Of vice, and virtue, in the schools;"
and whose principles of religion, though perfectly conformable to our established mode of worship, should, with regard to the best characteristic of it, know no difference of sect, but extend itself to the

outermost line of the great circle of charity, which embraces all mankind.

You will, perhaps, say that I have drawn an ideal character, like that of a patriot king.—It may be so; but the person I should select for such a purpose, of entering a young man of rank or fortune into the world at large, should be some reduced officer, whose humanity had been rather softened, than hardened, by danger and disappointment; one who had been trained up in the school of honour, which may be styled the true sublime of morals—And such a guardian, preceptor, or passport through life, I should prefer to the whole conclave of parsons; out of which class of men are too generally chosen the bear-leaders to our modern cubs of quality.—So much for governors.

I think you judge rightly, in not mentioning Miss Cleveland to Sir George, while your amour with Margarita is so recent—There is something extremely indelicate in professing a passion for a virtuous woman, before we have undergone a sufficient quarantine, after the contagion of an abandoned one—A man in such a situation resembles a centaur, half human, half brute—Or at best he can but say with Cyrus's friend Araspes,
"I have two souls!"
Sir George is too good a judge of human nature, not to excuse your infatuation in favour of an artful beauty; but how shall Miss Cleveland be reconciled to your infidelity? or on what security shall she rest her hope, that you may not be subject to a second delirium? Indeed, my dear Hume, a year is too short for a term of probation,

or rather of atonement, though you were to spend it in the severe penance which your prototype Don Quixote endured, for the disenchantment of Dulcinea, upon the Black Mountain.