us upstairs into a room with a bed in it. At first I seemed to
be unwilling to go up, but after a few words I yielded to that
too, being willing to see the end of it, and in hope to make
something of it at last. As for the bed, etc., I was not much
concerned about that part.
Here he began to be a little freer with me than he had promised;
and I by little and little yielded to everything, so that, in a word,
he did what he pleased with me; I need say no more. All this
while he drank freely too, and about one in the morning we
went into the coach again. The air and the shaking of the
coach made the drink he had get more up in his head than it
was before, and he grew uneasy in the coach, and was for
acting over again what he had been doing before; but as I
thought my game now secure, I resisted him, and brought him
to be a little still, which had not lasted five minutes but he fell
fast asleep.
I took this opportunity to search him to a nicety. I took a
gold watch, with a silk purse of gold, his fine full-bottom
periwig and silver-fringed gloves, his sword and fine snuff-box,
and gently opening the coach door, stood ready to jump out
while the coach was going on; but the coach stopped in the
narrow street beyond Temple Bar to let another coach pass,
I got softly out, fastened the door again, and gave my gentleman
and the coach the slip both together, and never heard more
of them.
This was an adventure indeed unlooked for, and perfectly
undesigned by me; though I was not so past the merry part
of life, as to forget how to behave, when a fop so blinded by
his appetite should not know an old woman from a young. I
did not indeed look so old as I was by ten or twelve years; yet
I was not a young wench of seventeen, and it was easy enough
to be distinguished. There is nothing so absurd, so surfeiting,
so ridiculous, as a man heated by wine in his head, and wicked
gust in his inclination together; he is in the possession of two
devils at once, and can no more govern himself by his reason
than a mill can grind without water; his vice tramples upon all
that was in him that had any good in it, if any such thing there
was; nay, his very sense is blinded by its own rage, and he acts
absurdities even in his views; such a drinking more, when he
is drunk already; picking up a common woman, without regard
to what she is or who she is, whether sound or rotten, clean
or unclean, whether ugly or handsome, whether old or young,
and so blinded as not really to distinguish. Such a man is worse
than a lunatic; prompted by his vicious, corrupted head, he no
more knows what he is doing than this wretch of mine knew
when I picked his pocket of his watch and his purse of gold.
These are the men of whom Solomon says, ‘They go like an
ox to the slaughter, till a dart strikes through their liver’; an
admirable description, by the way, of the foul disease, which
is a poisonous deadly contagion mingling with the blood,
whose centre or foundation is in the liver; from whence, by
the swift circulation of the whole mass, that dreadful nauseous
plague strikes immediately through his liver, and his spirits are
infected, his vitals stabbed through as with a dart.
It is true this poor unguarded wretch was in no danger from
me, though I was greatly apprehensive at first of what danger
I might be in from him; but he was really to be pitied in one
respect, that he seemed to be a good sort of man in himself;
a gentleman that had no harm in his design; a man of sense,
and of a fine behaviour, a comely handsome person, a sober
solid countenance, a charming beautiful face, and everything