your attention for the person, and are consequently the more engaging. Consult your own breast, and recollect how these little attentions, when shown you by others, flatter that degree of self-love and vanity, from which no man living, is free. Reflect how they incline and attract you to that person, and how you are propitiated afterward to all which that person says or does. The same causes will have the same effects in your favor.
Attentions to Ladies.—Women, in a great
degree, establish or destroy every man's reputation
of good-breeding; you must, therefore, in a manner,
overwhelm them with the attentions of which I
have spoken; they are used to them, they expect
them; and, to do them justice, they commonly
requite them. You must be sedulous, and rather
over officious than under, in procuring them their
coaches, their chairs, their conveniences in public
places; not see what you should not see; and rather
assist, where you cannot help seeing. Opportunities
of showing these attentions present themselves perpetually;
but if they do not, make them. As Ovid
advises his lover, when he sits in the circus near his
mistress, to wipe the dust off her neck, even if there
be none. Si nullus, tamen excute nullum. Your
conversation with women should always be respect-
