By the side of this fair one, arm in arm with a well-known bookseller,
you may perceive Harriette Kochforte, alias Wilson, who, according to
her own account, has had as many amours as the Grand Seignor can boast
wives, and with just as little of affection in the _affaires de cour_ as
his sublime highness, only with something more of publicity. Harriette
gives the honour of her introduction into the mysteries of Cytherea
to the Earl of Craven; but it is well known that a certain dashing
solicitor's clerk then living in the neighbourhood of Chelsea, and near
her amiable mamma's residence, first engrossed, her attention, and
by whom she exhibited increasing symptoms of affection, which being
properly engrafted on the person of the fair stockinger, in due time
required a release from a practitioner of another profession; an
innocent affair that now lies buried deep in an odd corner at the old
churchyard at Chelsea, without a monumental stone or epitaph to point
out the early virtues of the fair Cytherean. To this limb of the law
succeeded the Honourable Be--1--y C------n, who was then too volatile
and capricious to pay his devotions at any particular shrine for more
than a week together. It was this cold neglect of the honourable's that
has, perhaps, secured him from mention in her Memoirs; since Harriette
never speaks of her beaux without giving the reader to suppose they were
desperately in love with herself: then there was more of the dignified
in an affair with an earl, and Madame Harriette has a great notion of
preserving her consequence, although, it must be confessed, she has
latterly shown the most perfect indifference to the preservation of
character.
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