city might perish notwithstanding their care; nor by that of Romans, for they designed to extirpate the Roman name." Then proceeding to show his tender care and hearty affection for his people, he further told them, "That their course of life was of such pernicious consequence to the glory and grandeur of the Roman nation, that he could not choose but tell them, that all other crimes put together could not equalize theirs; for they were guilty of murder in not suffering those to be born which should proceed from them; of impiety, in causing the names and honours of their ancestors to cease; and of sacrilege in destroying their kind, which proceed from the immortal gods; and human nature, the principal thing consecrated to them: therefore in this respect they dissolved the government, in disobeying its laws; betrayed their country, by making it barren and waste; nay, and demolished their city, in depriving it of inhabitants. And he was sensible that all this proceeded, not from any kind of virtue or abstinence, but from a looseness and wantonness, which ought never to be encouraged in any civil government." There are no particulars dwelt upon that let us into the conduct of these young worthies, whom this great emperor treated with so much justice and indignation; but any one who observes what passes in this town, may. very well frame to himself a notion of their riots and debaucheries all night, and their apparent preparations for them all day. It is not to be doubted but these Romans never passed any of their time innocently but when they were asleep, and never slept but when they were weary and heavy with excesses, and slept only to prepare themselves for the repetition of them. If you did your duty as a Spectator, you would carefully examine into the number of births, marriages, burials: and when you had deducted out of your deaths all such as went out of the world without marrying, then cast up the number of both sexes born within such a term of years, last past, you might, from the single people departed, make some useful inferences or guesses how many there are left unmarried, and raise some useful scheme for the amendment of the age in that particular. I have not patience to proceed gravely on this abominable libertinism; for I can not but reflect, as I am writing to you, upon a certain lascivious manner which all our young gentlemen use in public, and examine our eyes with a petulancy in their own, which is a downright affront to modesty. A disdainful look on such an occasion is returned with a countenance rebuked, but by averting their eyes from the woman of honour and decency to some flippant creature, who will, as the phrase is, be kinder. I must set down things as they come into my head, without standing upon order. Ten thousand to one but the gay gentleman who stared, at the same time is a housekeeper; for you must know they have got into a humour of late of being very regular in their sins: and a young fellow shall keep his four maids and three footmen with the greatest gravity imaginable. There are no less than six of these venerable housekeepers of my acquaintance. This humour among young men of condition is imitated by all the world below them, and a general dissoluteness of manners arises from this one source of libertinism, with out shame or reprehension in the male youth. It is from this one fountain that so many beautiful, helpless, young women, are sacrificed and given up to lewdness, shame, poverty and disease. It is to this also that so many excellent young women, who might be patterns of conjugal affection, and parents of a worthy race, pine under unhappy passions for such as have not attention enough to observe, or virtue enough to prefer them to their common wenches. Now, Mr. Spectator, I must be free to own to you that I myself suffer a tasteless insipid being, from a consideration I have for a man who would not, as he has said in my hearing, resign his liberty as he calls it, for all the wealth and beauty the whole sex is possessed of. Such calamities as these would not happen, if it could possibly be brought about, that by fining bachelors as papists convict, or the like, they were distinguished to their disadvantage from the rest of the world who fall in with the measures of civil societies. Lest you should think I speak this, as being, according to the senseless rude phrase, a malicious old maid, I shall acquaint you, I am a woman of condition, not now three-and-twenty, and have had proposals from at least ten different men, and the greater number of them have, upon the upshot, refused me. Something or other is always amiss when the lover takes to some new wench: a settlement is easily excepted against; and there is very little recourse to avoid the vicious part of our youth, but throwing one's self away upon some lifeless blockhead, who, though he is without vice, is also without virtue. Now-a-days we must be contented if we can get creatures which are not bad, good are not to be expected. Mr. Spectator, I sat near you the other day, and I think I did not displease your Spectatorial eye-sight; which I shall be a better judge of when I see whether you take notice of these evils your own way, or print this memorial dictated from the disdainful heavy heart of, sir, Your most obedient humble servant, STEELE. T. No. 529. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6. Singula quæque locum teneant sortita decenter. HOR. Let every thing have its due place. ROSCOMMON. UPON the hearing of several late disputes concerning rank and precedence, I could not forbear amusing myself with some observations which I have made upon the learned world, as to this great particular. By the learned world I here mean, at large, all those who are any way concerned in works of literature, whether in the writing, printing, or repeating part. To begin with the writers; I have observed that the author of a folio, in all companies and conversations, sets himself above the author of a quarto: the author of a quarto above the author of an octavo, and so on by a gradual descent and subordination to an author in twenty-fours. This distinction is so well observed, that in an assembly of the learned, I have seen a folio writer place himself in an elbow-chair, when the author of a duodecimo has, out of a just deference to his superior quality, seated himself upon a squab. In a word, authors are usually ranged in company after the same manner as their works are upon a shelf. The most minute pocket author hath beneath him the writers of all pamphlets, or works that are only stitched. As for the pamphleteer, he takes place of none but of the authors of single sheets, and of that fraternity who publish their labours on certain days, or on every day of the week. I do not find that the precedency among the individuals, in this latter class of writers, is yet settled. For my own part, I have had so strict a regard to the ceremonial which prevails in the learned world, that I never presume to take place of a pamphleteer, till my daily papers were gathered into those two first volumes which, have already appeared. After which, I naturally jumped over the heads; not only of all pamphleteers, but of every octavo writer in Great Britain that had written but one book. I am also informed by my bookseller, that six octavos have at all times been looked upon as an equivalent to a folio, which I take notice of the rather, because I would not have the learned world surprised if, after the publication of half a dozen volumes, I take my place accordingly. When my scattered forces are thus rallied and reduced into regular bodies, I flatter myself that I shall make no despicable figure at the head of them. Whether these rules, which have been received, time out of mind, in the commonwealth of letters, were not originally established with an eye to our paper manufacture, I shall leave to |