to attire herself as a man, and taking her arm, presented herself before one Mr. Wyatt, who saw through the trick; but consenting for each eye, read

to be blinded by a guinea for each

the service, and delivered the certificate.

Mr. and Mrs. Boothby were married at the Salutation Tavern, near Great Andrew Church, on the 30th of September, in the year 1749; and on the first day of July, in the year 1750, was born Lætitia-Lavinia Boothby, the writer of these Memoirs, at Little Queen Street, where Mr. and Mrs. Boothby then lodged.

CHAPTER II.

Of my early life and hardships; with an account of a street-broil, and its consequences.

AS

S these Memoirs do not properly begin until the year 1771, when I was in my twenty-first year, I know not whether I shall be affording the reader much diversion by entering into a particular account of my life to that period; therefore, having a story to tell of which it is not right the reader should be baulked by long prefaces and digressions, I will here briefly set down one or two particulars, and then proceed to my relation.

It hath ever been the lot of the most beautiful women to perish early, and such was my mother's fate, she dying when I was three years old. Though I was far from being so advanced as to do without her, yet I could not but congratulate myself afterwards, when I reflected that I had received her care through

that tender time of infancy which most demands a mother's solicitude; for I was well on my feet, and had got all my teeth, before she died, and had gone through most of the sicknesses that usually befall infants.

I was too young to recollect whether my father's grief was great; but I make no doubt he lamented her decease with such demonstrations of woe as might have sprung from deeper feelings than he could be sensible of. For my part, I should say he mourned rather the mistress than the wife; for though they had lived together four years, yet her beauty had made that time seem but as four months, and doubtless another four years might have passed ere he would have found himself growing weary of the same fare. This speaks eloquently to my mother's powers of pleasing; for no man was ever more sensible of the cloying effects of repetition than Mr. Boothby, who would often say "that a dish of ortolans served every day, would make a man heartily sick of ortolans in a week."

I was very staid as a little girl, and as I began, so I grew. I had a knack of disguising my

Mrs. Boothby's early life.

2 I

feelings even at that season of youth when the passions have no constraint put upon them ; and could weep or laugh internally, without any sensible change discovering itself in my features. My mother's controul over Mr. Boothby had been beneficial while she lived; for the charms of her company took him away from the society of the alehouses and taverns; and though she was an actress, yet her virtue was incorruptible, whilst her sprightly airs and romping spirits lent such a modest fascination to her society, as Mr. Boothby could not contemplate without visibly improving his own manners and morals. He owed largely his support to her gains at the theatre; so that when she died he found his loss to be in more accounts than one.

The unexpected stroke of her death, which was occasioned by an inflammation of the lungs, put him upon the necessity of seeking his own living; and though no doubt, at the first setting off, the struggle between Hunger and Virtue was great, yet Hunger at last prevailed, and drove him once again to that vicious society from which his marriage had rescued him. We went into meaner lodgings in the same street,

and I would often have gone without a dinner but for the charity of the landlord, who having a little girl of my own years, was rendered sympathetick of my distress. Yet I took care never to complain; the calm gravity of my countenance never exposed the resentment against Mr. Boothby that sometimes lay burning at my heart.

The few guineas Mr. Boothby was from time to time possessed of were more often the fruits of gaming than of literature. His habit was to spend the evening at a gaming-house, where he would stake what money he had. If fortune was propitious, he would return to his lodgings, order a bottle from a neighbouring tavern, which he would empty and then to bed. But if luck was adverse, he would entice some young spark, new to the town, from the gaming-house to a tavern near to St. Paul's, where, pretending to congratulate him on his luck or to commiserate his loss, he would bawl for a pack of cards, and backed by some dissolute fellows who would share the plunder thus acquired, would fleece the victim of his last groat.

But it was not always he would meet with