Mr. Walton
had a daughter; and such a daughter! we will attempt some
description of her by and by.
Harley's notions of the ?a???, or beautiful, were not always to be
defined, nor indeed such as the world would always assent to, though
we could define them. A blush, a phrase of affability to an
inferior, a tear at a moving tale, were to him, like the Cestus of
Cytherea, unequalled in conferring beauty. For all these Miss
Walton was remarkable; but as these, like the above-mentioned
Cestus, are perhaps still more powerful when the wearer is possessed
of souse degree of beauty, commonly so called, it happened, that,
from this cause, they had more than usual power in the person of
that young lady.
She was now arrived at that period of life which takes, or is
supposed to take, from the flippancy of girlhood those
sprightlinesses with which some good-natured old maids oblige the
world at three-score. She had been ushered into life (as that word
is used in the dialect of St. James's) at seventeen, her father
being then in parliament, and living in London: at seventeen,
therefore, she had been a universal toast; her health, now she was
four-and-twenty, was only drank by those who knew her face at least.
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