MADAM,
WHEN ‘squire Bickerstaff, in the time of our mothers, such a time as, if their accounts may be trusted, is never likely to return, took upon him to entertain the town, he endeavoured to secure a kind reception by deducing his genealogy, and proving his relation to the whole family of the Staffs
If you can either by proximity of blood, or similitude of mind, shew your alliance to the numerous and powerful generation of Triflers,you may set any other race of mortals at defiance; for very little is to be feared from any power against which the Triflers shall form a combination.
I have always had the honour of being numbered among the Triflers; my mother, my grand-mother, and my grand-mother’s mother, were all Triflers before me. You know, if you know any thing of Trifles, that it is the peculiar practice of our family to count their pedigree on the female side. By the advantage of a strong memory, diligently stored with repeated narratives, I have an exact knowledge of the whole succession of Trifles, which have engaged the elegant and gay for two centuries and a half.
It is said in one of Steel’s comedies, that nobody despises the honours of ancestry but those that want them; and therefore I will not lose any advantage of hereditary excellency. My mother was the best knotter of queen Mary’s court; my aunt Pen was the third lady that in the reign of Charles the Second tied ribands to her nipples; my grand-mother was a country gentlewoman, and has left little behind her except a scented paste, with which the beauties of her time used to clear their skins without the help of water. My grand-mother appeared at the court of James the First in Mrs. Turner’s yellow starch, and her mother was always solicited to cut out ruffs by queen’s Elizabeth’s maids of honour.
I suppose, madam, you will now allow me to be a genuine and legitimate Trifler; and I should be glad that you could by equal authority clear your pretensions to a place among the sisterhood. Triflers are always jealous; and I will not conceal my suspicions, that you are claiming a character without right; and that your life has not been passed regularly among us; that you have either wanted the initiation of the boarding-school, or the completion of the ball-room.
I know, that it is common enough among periodical authors to forget their titles: they fill their heads with the theory of a plan which experience soon shews them to be too narrow to last long. The Tatler often talks with the most solemn austerity of wisdom, and the Guardian deviates into many topicks with which as a Guardian he has no concern; but none ever started from her own purpose so soon as the Trifler; and therefore I am afraid, that she has taken a province which she cannot fill.
To the first paper I made no objection: it is natural to a Trifler to think her own adventures important, and to tell them to those who do not wish to hear them: but the second paper has betrayed you. Can you think love and courtship subjects for a Trifler? If love be a Trifle, what can we call serious? The truth is that almost all other female employments are the sports of idleness; and that they seldom cease to trifle till they begin to love.
It is impossible in reading a book not to form some image of the writer. You have told us little of yourself; and therefore your readers are left to their own conjectures. To tell you the truth, I conceive you to be a rural virgin, that after having passed about thirty years between reading and needle-work among groves and brooks, has at the invitation of some great lady left her grotto and bower, and come to take a view of the scenes of life, with no other ideas of love or pleasure than she has gathered from the amours and amusements of her own village.
I do not wonder that to a votaress of studious tranquility, the whole bustle of the town appears a Trifle. Much of the splendor, and much of the cares of life, I shall willingly give up to your sport or censure. You may say what you will of pleasures where no heart is light, of connections without kindness, of struggles for precedency, of competitions for the newest fashion; but believe me, dear Dryad, to love and to be loved is a serious business; and whatever customs of courtship, caprice, levity, or vanity, have dictated, however the modes of approach between the sexes may be varied by the accidents of time or place, it is not for the Trifler to treat as Trifles those operations which unite us for ever to tyrants or to friends, to savages or to sages, and which terminate the flighty wit, or airy flutterer in a wife, an economist, a mother, and a grand-mother.
I am, Madam, Your very Humble Servant. PENELOPE SPINDLE.