Ulysses
he is a tenant at will while he trembled for the security of his
four per cents? Has he forgotten this as he forgets all ben-
efits received? Or is it that from being a deluder of others he
has become at last his own dupe as he is, if report belie him
not, his own and his only enjoyer? Far be it from candour
to violate the bedchamber of a respectable lady, the daugh-
ter of a gallant major, or to cast the most distant reflections
upon her virtue but if he challenges attention there (as it
was indeed highly his interest not to have done) then be it
so. Unhappy woman, she has been too long and too per-
sistently denied her legitimate prerogative to listen to his
objurgations with any other feeling than the derision of the
desperate. He says this, a censor of morals, a very pelican
in his piety, who did not scruple, oblivious of the ties of na-
ture, to attempt illicit intercourse with a female domestic
drawn from the lowest strata of society! Nay, had the hussy’s
scouringbrush not been her tutelary angel, it had gone with
her as hard as with Hagar, the Egyptian! In the question of
the grazing lands his peevish asperity is notorious and in
Mr Cuffe’s hearing brought upon him from an indignant
rancher a scathing retort couched in terms as straightfor-
ward as they were bucolic. It ill becomes him to preach that
gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies fallow
for the want of the ploughshare? A habit reprehensible at
puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life.
If he must dispense his balm of Gilead in nostrums and ap-
othegms of dubious taste to restore to health a generation of
unfledged profligates let his practice consist better with the
doctrines that now engross him. His marital breast is the