The English Spy, page 378 by Bernard Blackmantle
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g the ear by one immoral or indelicate expression. For the unhappy fair ones who form the principal portraits, it should be remembered they have been selected from those only who are notorious, as belles of the first order, stars of fashion, and if not something indebted to fortune they would have escaped enrolment here. When beauty and poverty are allied, it must too often fall a victim to the eager eye of roving lust; for, even to the titled ~55~~profligate, beauty, when arrayed in a simple garb of spotless chastity, seems
"----Fairer she In innocence and homespun vestments spread, Than if cerulean sapphires at her ears Shone pendent, or a precious diamond cross Heaved gently on her panting bosom white.
But let the frail remember, that the allurements of wealth and the blandishments of equipage fall off with possession and satiety; to the force of novelty succeeds the baseness of desertion. For a short time, the fallen one is fed like the silk-worm upon the fragrant mulberry leaf, and when she has spun her yellow web of silken attraction, sinks into decay, a common chrysalis, shakes her trembling and emaciated wings in hopeless agony, and then flutters and droops, till death steps in and relieves her from an accumulation of miseries, ere yet the transient summer of youth has passed over her devoted head.
Bernard Blackmantle.
[Illustration: page055]
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAUGHTER;
OR, MR PUNCH IN ALL HIS GLORY.
Thoughts on the Philosophy of Laughter--Bernard Blackmantle in Search of a Wife--First Visit to the Marigold Family-- Sketches of the Alderman, his Lady, and Daughter--Anecdote of John Liston, and the Citizen's Dinner Party--Of the Immortal Mr. Punch--Some Account of the Great Actor--A Street Scene, sketched from the Life--The Wooden Drama--The True Sublime.
[Illustration: page056]
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You may sing of old Thespis, who first in a cart, To the jol