desperation: YE, who find the likeness of this picture, stop, while time puts it in your power! are Happy the people, who governed by a MONARCH, like the present RULER OF GREAT BRITAIN CONSTANCY presides over his marriage couch; and a virtuous and beloved consort gilds the evening of his life with the splendid beams of her domestic virtues. The example of royalty, like a mighty torrent, carries all before it ; and when a Prince spurns the marriage vow with contumely, and loves every man's wife better than his own, the nation, down to the lowest mechanic, boasts of an affair, with the wife of his friend, or the little girl which he keeps at his cottage ornee; while the obscure, private gentleman of small fortune, takes the pretty lass he is weary of, in the Hoy, to a fashionable Watering Place; and is supremely happy, when he has displayed her fine figure on the public walk, if the Great Man will once deign to notice him, for her sake! Does the Prince game? Oh! how spirited does the city apprentice think himself when he loses his last guinea, at a game of whist or casino! Does the Prince degrade his fine talents, and destroy his beautiful person, by ever sinking into the stupid and vilifying vice of inebriety? What a buck does the wealthy citizen think, himself, when carried to his bed, in a state of insensibility, from an excess of claret and Champaigne ! and how does he boast of the heroic deed, the next morning, and, with an important laugh, triumphantly declare, that "the Prince himself, was never so d----d drunk, as he was, the night before.” It must, in defiance of every innovating system or opinion, be truly maintained, that, "Example goes farther than precept;" and we cannot forbear repeating the affirmation, that human nature is, in every age, the same. The coarse language of some females in the fifteenth century, is closely copied by the equivoque, however neatly wrapped up, which several ladies, of high fashion, pride themselves in at the present day. The low expressions made use of in the times of gothic ignorance, still hold their empire over the lips of our fashionables; and display all their wonted energy in the slang of the turf, the barbarous terms attached to pugilism, and the eccentric expressions, known only to the select societies of Bond-street and Lobby Loungers. The gamesome frolics and Christmas gambols of our forefathers, where laughter presided, while the joke went round, and happy mirth supplied the place of sati |