Since you have so fertile an invention, said Sir Charles, you may easily repair this mistake. Odds-heart! it is pity you are not poor enough to be an author; you would occupy a garret in Grub-street, with great fame to yourself, and diversion to the public.
Oh! sir, cried Sir George, I have stock enough by me to set up for an author to-morrow, if I please: I have no less than five tragedies, some quite, others almost finished; three or four essays on virtue, happiness, &c.; three thousand lines of an epic poem; half a dozen epitaphs; a few acrostics; and a long string of puns, that would serve to embellish a daily paper, if I was disposed to write one.
Nay, then, interrupted Mr. Glanville, you are qualified for a critic at the Bedford Coffee-house; where, with the rest of your brothers, demi-wits, you may sit in judgment upon the productions of a Young, a Richardson, or a Johnson; rail with premeditated malice at the Rambler; and, for the want of faults, turn even its inimitable beauties into ridicule. The language, because it reaches to perfection, may be called stiff, laboured, and pedantic; the criticisms, when they let in more light than your weak judgment can bear, superficial and ostentatious glitter; and because those papers contain the finest system of ethics yet extant, damn the queer fellow, for over-propping virtue; an excellent new phrase! which those who can find no meaning in, may accommodate with one of their own. Then give shrewd hints, that some persons, though they do not publish their performances, may have more merit than those that do.
Upon my soul, Charles, said Sir George, thou art such an ill-natured fellow, that I am afraid thou wilt be sneering at me when I am gone; and wilt endeavour to persuade Lady Bella, that not a syllable of my story is true. Speak, pursued he, wilt thou have the cruelty to deprive me of my lawful claim to the great kingdom of Kent, and rob me of the glory of fighting singly against five hundred men?
I do not know, said Sir Charles, whether my niece be really imposed upon, by the gravity with which you told your surprising history; but I protest I thought you were in earnest at first, and that you meant to make us believe it all to be fact.
You are so fitly punished, said Mr. Glanville, for that ill-judged adventure you related last, by the bad opinion Lady Bella entertains of you, that I need not add to your misfortune: and therefore, you shall be Prince Veridomer, if you please; since, under that character, you are obliged not to pretend to any lady but the incomparable Philonice.
Sir George, who understood his meaning, went home to think of some means by which he might draw himself out of the embarrassment he was in; and Mr. Glanville, as he had promised, did not endeavour to undeceive Lady Bella with regard to the history he had feigned; being very well satisfied with his having put it out of his power to make his addresses to her, since she now looked upon him as the lover of Philonice.
As for Sir Charles, he did not penetrate into the meaning of Sir George's story; and only imagined, that by relating such a heap of adventures, he had a design to entertain the company, and give a proof of the facility of his invention; and Miss Glanville, who supposed he had been ridiculing her cousin's strange notions, was better pleased with him than ever.
Arabella, however, was less satisfied than any of them: she could not endure to see so brave a knight, who drew his birth from a race of kings, tarnish the glory of his gallant actions by so base a perfidy.
Alas! said she to herself, how much reason has the beautiful Philonice to accuse me for all the anguish she suffers! since I am the cause that the ungrateful prince, on whom she bestows her affections, suffers her to remain quietly in the hands of her ravisher, without endeavouring to rescue her: but, oh! too lovely and unfortunate fair-one, said she, as if she had been present, and listening to her, distinguish, I beseech you, between those faults which the will and those which necessity makes us commit. I am the cause, it is true, of thy lover's infidelity; but I am the innocent cause, and would repair the evils my fatal beauty gives rise to, by any sacrifice in my power to make.