Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, and a
withered gentlewoman, whose name was the Widow Wycherly. They were all
melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose
greatest misfortune it was, that they were not long ago in their graves.
Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous merchant,
but had lost his all by a frantic speculation, and was now little better
than a mendicant. Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years, and his
health and substance, in the pursuit of sinful pleasures, which had
given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout, and divers other
torments of soul and body. Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man
of evil fame, or at least had been so, till time had buried him from the
knowledge of the present generation, and made him obscure instead of
infamous. As for the Widow Wycherly, tradition tells us that she was a
great beauty in her day; but, for a long while past, she had lived in
deep seclusion, on account of certain scandalous stories, which had
prejudiced the gentry of the town against her.
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