Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/151

that he would go at all who was fitter for the house of mourning; so the most we concede is, that he may go with listlessness, out of politeness to his companions. In either case he would have to encounter that hot-bed of vice, the lobby, in a state very unfit to undergo its scorching ordeal. If he cannot withstand the temptation, let me conjure him to act with as much prudence as the case will admit; above all things, let him not retire and come back again. Let him not treat two women at the same time, lest their rivality should interest his mind: I pay nothing about the heart in these lucubrations, that is quite out of the question; although I have known a young man of character actually to marry a girl of the town, who had paced all the pavement in the line of march, and knew almost every stone in its whole extent. What a pretty brewing of mischief was in this false step? If my reader must dally in the lobby, let him not disclose his name, nor make a new appointment with intention to keep it; let him turn a deaf ear to one half that is said, and disbelieve the other. Better than either would it be, to examine the beauties that inhabit there, with the same apathy that a florist examines his tulips, or the na-