which I allow to be called love. It is not the person who could please me most, but her that I am most desirous to please, who is truly adored.

To judge of this let us consider the character of a beauteous female coquette. This creature seems designed to give a man pleasure, and pleasure without pain, though not qualified to give him love; access is easy, enjoyment sure. Free from restraint or obligations, not fettered with the chains of pretended constancy, you meet her with satisfaction and you part with ease; and are warm enough for pleasure, not exposed to the heats of jealousy, and safe from the cold of despair. A true epicure (but not a lover) can content himself with this, and this may be agreed to be the pleasure-giving lady.

This is no unlively picture of a woman who can please, but far from that person to whom we resign our hearts in the delicate way of love. How shall I describe the woman capable of inspiring a true, respectful tenderness? Who so fills the soul with herself that she leaves room for no other ideas but those of endeavouring to serve and please her? Self-interest, self-satisfaction, are too natural, too powerful, to be quite destroyed, but they are in a manner laid asleep when at the same time we respect and fear her whom we love.

I must always more or less endeavour to maintain by proof what I assert, but I am not at liberty to pursue a pleasure that may give you too much trouble at a time. I begin my next with telling you what Amoret should be, or what I think she is.

Mrs. Howard's Reply to the Foregoing.

ONE would imagine, by observing upon the world, that every man thought it necessary to be in love just as he does to talk to show his superiority to a brute; but such pretenders have only convinced us that they want that quality they would be thought to have.

How few are there born with souls capable of friendship! then how much fewer must there be capable of love, for love includes friendship and much more besides! That you might mistake love in others, I grant you; but I wonder how you could mistake it in yourself. I should have thought, if anybody else had said so, he had never been in love.

Those rocks and precipices and those mighty difficulties which you say are to be undergone in the progress of love, can only be meant in the pursuit of a coquette, or where there is no hope of a sincere return. Or perhaps you may suppose all women incapable of being touched with so del

icate a passion.

In the voyage of love, you complain of great hardships, narrow seas, and no compass. You still think all women coquettes. He that can use art to subdue a woman is not in love; for how can you suppose a man capable of acting by reason who has not one of his senses under command? Do you think a lover sees or hears his mistress like standers-by? Whatever her looks may be, or however she talks, he sees nothing but roses and lilies, and hears only an angel.

The civilities of some women seem to me, like those of shop-keepers, to encourage a multitude of customers. Who is so obliging to all her lovers as a coquette? She can express her civilities with the utmost ease and freedom to all her admirers alike; while the person that loves, entirely neglects or forgets everybody for the sake of one. Το α woman who loves, every man is an impertinent who declares his passion, except the one man she loves.

Your coquette or "pleasure-giving lady" that can part from you without regret, that cannot feel jealousy, and does not pretend to constancy, I should think a very undesirable thing. I have always imagined that they thought it necessary at least to feign love in order to make themselves agreeable, and that the best dissemblers were the most admired.

Every one that loves thinks his own mistress an Amoret, and therefore ask any lover who and what Amoret is, and he will describe his own mistress as she appears to himself; but the common practice of men of gallantry is to make an Amoret of every lady they write to. And, my lord, after you have summed up all the fine qualities necessary to make an Amoret, I am under some apprehensions you will conclude with a compliment, by saying, I am she.

Letters of Richard Steele.

DICK STEELE may have had many weaknesses and some vices, but we could forgive a good deal of both to a man who could write so tenderly to a woman as he writes to his dear Prue." His wife was Miss Mary Scurlock, and the first two of the following letters were written to her during courtship. It is said that she was at first averse to marriage, but surrendered after a month's wooing, and then erased the dates of their letters, that in showing them to a friend it might not appear she was so quickly

won.

After marriage Steele's gayety, his conviviality, and his recklessness about getting into debt, must often have made trouble for Mrs. Steele, and she must have had much cause to reproach him. Yet he almost disarms censure by his penitent acknowledgment of his faults and by his constant affection. He is frequently dining out and sleeping out, but he never fails to send Mrs. Steele a loving

word before dinner or bedtime.

He goes to dine with

Lord Halifax, and writes home:

I DINE with Halifax, but shall be home at half-aftersix. For thee I die, for thee I languish.

DICK STEELE.

P. S. Dress yourself well, and look beautifully to please your faithful husband.

"All women especially," says Thackeray, are bound to be grateful to Steele, for he was the first of our writers who seemed both to admire and respect them;" and every woman who reads the last and longest letter quoted here from Steele's correspondence will, I think, feel both gratitude and tenderness. This was a public letter to be used as a dedicatory epistle to the "Ladies' Library," a work in three volumes, which Steele published in 1714, after they had been seven years married.

Mrs. Steele's correspondence has not been preserved. I find only these few lines of prose and the dozen lines of verse following, to denote in what spirit she met his affection. The first seems to have been written after a little tiff between the married lovers, probably concerning money matters.

'Ir is but an addition to our uneasiness to be at variance with each other. I beg your pardon if I have offended you. God forgive you for adding to the sorrow of a heavy heart that is above all sorrow but for your sake."

Mrs. Steele to her Husband.

Aн, Dick Steele, that I were sure

Your love, like mine, would still endure;

That time nor absence, which destroys

The cares of lovers and their joys,

May never rob me of that part