The Adventures of Roderick Random

Wit and Playhouse Pursuits

Wit and Playhouse Pursuits

Through his playhouse connections, conversations with the actors behind the scenes, and acquaintance with a body of templars, the narrator soon commences a professed wit and critic. He considers himself far better qualified than any of his companions, whom he finds, generally speaking, to be the most ignorant and assuming creatures he has ever known. These avocations enable him to master care and separate his ideas so that, whenever attacked by a gloomy reflection, he can shove it aside and summon some agreeable reverie to his assistance.

First Mysterious Billet-Doux

First Mysterious Billet-Doux

One day the narrator receives by the penny post a letter in a woman’s hand, containing high-flown compliments, warm and poetical protestations of love, and an earnest desire to know whether his heart is engaged. She directs him to leave an answer at a certain place addressed to R. B., and subscribes herself “Your incognita.” The narrator is transported with joy, admires the composition as a masterpiece of tenderness and elegance, and is already up to his ears in love with the author, whom his imagination represents as a young and beautiful lady of fortune. He labours to compose a suitably hyperbolic reply, expresses admiration of her wit, declares himself enamoured of her understanding, and implores the honour of an interview. Strap, dispatched with the letter to a milliner’s house near Bond Street, keeps watch and learns that a chairman carried the reply to the house of a rich gentleman in the neighbourhood, where a waiting-woman received it. At a neighbouring alehouse he is told that the gentleman has an only daughter, very handsome, who will inherit his whole estate, and the narrator concludes that this must be the author of the billet. Walking past the house in state, he glimpses a beautiful young creature at the dining-room window whom he fancies observes him with more than common curiosity, and feigns to stop in the street opposite her station to feast both her view and his own.