CHAP. XIV. Some account of the person, and character of Dolly Tinder, Tom’s new mistress.

Here would have been a fair opportunity for some writers, fond of digressions, to indulge their favourite passions, by making, or fabricating a good long chapter upon judicial Astrology, but we scorn to swell our book to an enormous size by any such mean expedient, as we do not want matter, (we will not say subject matter, for fear of offending that delicate mythologist, master Launcelot, the templar) sufficient to carry on a larger volume, than the present, without having recourse to such low stratagems.

We shall give the reader a concise, and more entertaining chapter on the charms and morals of Dolly Tinder, daughter of an eminent lamp-lighter of this metropolis. Her mother was as famous in her branch of business, being a very substantial linen-draper, (as the Welch collier says in the recruiting officer of his wife, poor Mary ——) it being this matrons business to gather rags for the paper mills. Thus born of mean but honest parents, Dolly, who, as she grew up, was a jolly bucksom wench, seemed cut out for servitude, and to this she applied herself with indefatigable industry; but unhappily for her among the other places in which she had lived, she was in the sixteenth year of her age, in the employ of a warfinger, in the regions of Black Fryars, here it was that she contracted an acquaintance with the water-men, and an amour with one of the lads of the skullers. Many were the voyages she made on the Thames, with her lover, who always refused the least fee, or gratuity for his beloved mistress, as he had reason to expect, she would pay him the fare in another coin. Neither did she prove ungrateful, or unfavourable to his wishes; for before she was in her seventeenth year, she found her stays grow narrower, and narrower, so as not to be able to contain that waist, so often commended for it’s taper symmetry; when those evident marks of her pregnancy appeared, she quitted her mother’s house, and fled for refuge to that of her mother-in-law, who received her as the wife of her son, and she was brought to bed of a chopping boy, which, when she was well, was by general consent, carried by the good old matron to the foundling hospital, and there deposited; whether he is as yet received into the marine society, we cannot be assured, but being begot under Aquarius, he may probably one day become an able commander at sea, and be an honour to the element from whence he sprung. The waterman her lover, like his native river, was like all other lovers, liable to inconstancy, so he soon manifested his neglect by a very cold indifference, and once by a severe beating. She was not behind hand with him, for she revenged the insult by immediately throwing herself into the element of Fire, and took up with a glass-man. Thus she became again connected to her own family affinities, since her lover had a near correspondence with the occupation of her father,—Glass and Fire. As she had lived so long among the Pleiades, she now removed her quarters to the hotter constellations, and since her Aquarius with his buckets, was unwilling any longer to quench that flame which he had lighted up in her bosom, she resolved to repel heat by heat, choosing her residence under the sultry influence of Sirius, the Dog-star; by him she had, during the succession of ten years, a litter of whelps, most of which fell to the lot of the above repository, which as the grave receives the forlorn dead, is appointed to receive the forlorn living. After so long a cohabitation, and a visible decline in her charms, from incessant child-bearing, it is no wonder if the Glass man, burnt up with the flames of coals, and the flames of love, was now burnt to a cinder, which indeed he was in a metaphorical sense, for he died of a decay, and left her a widow to the wide world, and forlorn-hope.—But Dolly was not so very much fallen into the vale of years, being now twenty-eight, but she retained some reliques of her former beauty, and one day as she was walking across the Temple courts, an old gentleman of the Middle Temple became enamoured of her, and giving her the keys of his chambers, was soon admitted to her embraces, though not to his affections, for she was of too liberal a nature to refuse the repeated sollicitations of several young Templers, with whom she lived successively, being nevertheless constant to each of her paramours, during her legal administration among them. By their bounty, she became possessed of ten pounds, which she generously bestowed on an eminent chimney-sweeper, being unwilling to quit the precincts of her favourite element the fire, of which she had so much in her constitution, that some say, she was troubled with Messalina’s failing: But with this Vulcan she did not chuse to live long, being tired of his sooty embraces; she accordingly robbed him, and fled to the Borough, where she actually, and for the first time married a chairman; but thinking this condition of life too humble, she aspired to the coach-box, and having eloped from the Christian beast of burthen, she lived with Automedon, and afterwards entered into the constellation of Auriga, by going into the arms of a waggoner, till at length tired with a variety of lovers, she prudently resolved to turn oyster-woman, and live independant of that monster man, so far as her warm complexion would admit her. She soon grew weary of this occupation of life, and lived with a Jew, an old clothes-man, by whose itinerations through Monmouth-street, she became acquainted with her late mistress, and entered into her service much about the æra of our feline history. The other part of Dolly’s history the reader has been informed of, and therefore we shall resume the more respectable annals of our Hero.