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LOVES OF A BACHELOR. 



There is no class of beings I know of in the world so profusely 

 and so undeservedly ridiculed by people in general, male and female, 

 as those individuals belonging to the order of bachelors. In every 

 company and every place they are held up as laughing stocks by 

 every juvenile coxcomb and by every old married fool. Nor is this the 

 worst of the matter. Were the ridicule of our own sex the only bat- 

 teries discharged at the unfortunate bachelor, he must be a simple- 

 ton indeed if he could not defend himself, and, right or wrong, 

 retort with some degree of plausibility on his opponents ; but the 

 mischief is that the poor bachelor is daily — hourly I should rather 

 have said — assailed by the ladies, from the old maid verging on 

 " three score and ten years " down to little Miss in her teens, not yet 

 escaped from the thraldom of the boarding school. With the ladies 

 the bachelor is on this, as on most other subjects, very unequally 

 matched ; and, accordingly, in every instance in which he is forced 

 into the arena with them, he is sure to come off in the estimation 

 of the arbiters with signal dishonour to himself. 



It is my misfortune, for such I consider it, to belong to the frater- 

 nity of bachelors ; and I can unhappily say, with too safe a con- 

 science, that I have come in for my own share of the abuse and injustice 

 of which my brethren in general so loudly complain. In a thousand 

 instances I have been held up, in the midst of a mo"'t respectable and 

 numerous company, as destitute of the common feelings, suscepti- 

 bilities, affections, and all that sort of things, of humanity ; and have 

 even, times without number, been represented as unworthy the ap- 

 pellation of man. 



Very iew rational beings, I presume, are so constituted as to be 

 able to bear all this without feeling uncomfortable under it. For my 

 own part, I have been uninterruptedly miserable ever since I was 

 generally considered a confirmed bachelor ; and as it is very un- 

 certain how soon I may become a tenant of the " narrow house," and 

 as, like most other men, I am solicitous to die on a good understand- 

 ing with all men — yes, and with all zcomen too, although the reader, 

 by the time he comes to the end of the chapter, may be greatly sur- 

 prised at this — I have resolved on making a " full, true, and particu- 

 lar" confession of the circumstances which have imposed on me the 

 necessity — for the reader will, by and by, do me the justice to ac- 

 knowledge that with me it has not been matter of choice — of living 

 a life of what is most erroneously designated " single blessedness." 

 I do not say that all of my brethren have adopted their bachelor 

 habits from precisely similar considerations and circumstances; 

 but I am perfectly satisfied in ray own mind that a striking 

 analogy, were the whole truth known, would be found to exist be- 

 tween their history and mine, in the overwhelming majority of in- 

 stances. 



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