" Oho, my
youth! if I had you horsed, thinks I again.--But, indeed, Sir John
well scourged him with his tongue for that expression, and I should
have hoped he had made him ashamed, had not his subsequent behaviour
shewn him totally void of grace. For when Sir John asked him for a
toast, which you know is another word for drinking the health of one's
friend or wife, or some person of public eminence, he named the health
of a married woman, filled out a bumper of wine, swore he would drink
her health in vinegar, and at last openly profest he would commit
adultery with her if he could. _Proh pudor!_ Nay, and if such a
sin might admit of any aggravation, she is it seems a lady of very
high degree, _et quidem_, the wife of a lord.
_Et dies et charta deficerent si omnia vellem percurrere, multa
quldem impura et impudica quae memorare nefas, recitavit_. Nor is
this youth, it seems, a monster or prodigy in the age he lives; on the
contrary, I am told he is an exemplar only of all the rest.
But I now proceed to what must surprize you. After he had spent an
hour in rehearsing all the vices to which youth have been ever too
much addicted, and shewn us that he was possessed of them all--_Ut
qui impudicus, adulter, ganeo, alea, manu, ventre, pene, bona patria
laceraverat_, he began to enter upon politics:
O proceres censore opus an haruspice nobis!
This stripling, this _bowe_, this rake, discovered likewise all
the wickedness peculiar to age, and that he had not, with those vices
which proceed from the warmth of youth, one of the virtues which we
should naturally expect from the same sanguine disposition.
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