In the rashness then of their age, and bent as they were
to accomplish their project of preposterous pleasure, at the
risk of the very worst of consequences, where a discovery was
nothing less than improbable, they now proceeded to such
lengths as soon satisfied me what they were.
The criminal scene they acted, I had the patience to see
to an end, purely that I might gather more facts and certainly
against them in my design to do their deserts instance jus-
tice; and accordingly, when they had readjusted themselves,
and were preparing to go out, burning as I was with rage and
indignation, I jumped down from the chair, in order to raise
the house upon them, but with such an unlucky impetuosity,
that some nail or ruggedness in the floor caught my foot, and
flung me on my face with such violence that I fell senseless
on the ground, and must have lain there some time e'er any
one came to my relief: so that they, alarmed, I suppose, by
the noise of my fall, had more than the necessary time to
make a safe retreat. This they effected, as I learnt, with a
precipitation nobody could account for, till, when come to
myself, and compos'd enough to speak, I acquainted those of
the house with the whole transaction I had been evidence to.
When I came home again, and told Mrs. Cole this adven-
ture, she very sensibly observ'd to me that there was no doubt
of due vengeance one time of other overtaking these miscre-
ants, however they might escape for the present; and that, had
I been the temporal instrument of it, I should have been at
least put to a great deal more trouble and confusion that I
imagined; that, as to the thing itself, the less said of it
was the better; but that though she might be suspected of
partiality, from its being the common cause of woman-kind, out
of whose mouths this practice tended to take something more
than bread, yet she protested against any mixture of passion,
with a declaration extorted from her by pure regard to truth;
which was that whatever effect this infamous passion had in
other ages and other countries, it seem'd a peculiar blessing
on our air and climate, that there was a plague-spot visibly
imprinted on all that are tainted with it, in this nation at
least; for that among numbers of that stamp whom she had
known, or at least were universally under the scandalous sus-
picion of it, she would not name an exception hardly of one
of them, whose character was not, in all other respects, the
most worthless and despicable that could be, stript of all
the manly virtues of their own sex, and fill'd up with only
the worst vices and follies of ours: that, in fine, they were
scarce less execrable than ridiculous in their monstrous in-
consistence, of loathing and condemning women, and all at the
same time apeing all their manners, air, lips, skuttle, and,
in general, all their little modes of affectation, which be-
come them at least better than they do these unsex'd male-
misses.
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