I sat with them till it was very late, sometimes in merry, sometimes in serious discourse, with this particular pleasure, which gives the only true relish to all conversation, a sense that every one of us liked each other. I went home, considering the different conditions of a married life and that of a bachelor; and I must confess, it struck me with a secret concern, to reflect, that whenever I go off, I shall leave no traces behind me. In this pensive mood I returned to my family; that is to say, to my maid, my dog and my cat, who only can be the better or worse for what happens to me.
[283] Her doll. _Cf._ "Wentworth Papers," p. 451, where Lady Anne Wentworth, aged eight, writing to her father of a younger sister, says, "Lady Hariote desires you to bring her a baby." The best dolls were called "Bartholomew babies," says Professor Henry Morley ("Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair," 1859, p. 333).
A passage in Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia" (Book III.) aptly illustrates this use of the word "baby": "We see young babes think babies of wonderful excellency, and yet the babies are but babies." From the private account-book of Isabella, Duchess of Grafton, who married, as her second husband, Sir T. Hanmer, it appears that in 1710 the Duchess gave £2, 3s. for a "baby" ("Correspondence of Sir T. Hanmer, Bart.," 1838, pp. 236 _seq._).
[284] Elderly men wore black, brown, or grizzly wigs.
[285] See the letter from Isaac Bickerstaff in No. 246, and No. 151. In Lillie's "Letters sent to the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_," i. 210-211, there is a letter dated Jan. 21, 1712, referring to "the unaccountable custom that for some time has prevailed among our fashionable gentlemen, of coming abroad in this cold, unseasonable weather with their breasts and bodies almost quite naked, by which means they have procured such terrible coughs." The object here was to display the shirt; old men followed the fashion in the hope of seeming young.
[286] See No. 24, and Sheridan's "School for Scandal," act iii. sc. 3:
"Let the toast pass, Drink to the lass, I warrant she'll prove an excuse for the glass!"
[287] A strain of martial music. "Turning your books to greaves, your ink to blood, your pens to lances; and your tongue divine to a loud trumpet, and a point of war" ("2 Henry IV.," act iv. sc. I).