PREFACE.
PREFACE
The following History is given in a series of letters, written
Principally in a double yet separate correspondence;
Between two young ladies of virtue and honor, bearing an inviolable
friendship for each other, and writing not merely for amusement, but
upon the most interesting subjects; in which every private family,
more or less, may find itself concerned; and,
Between two gentlemen of free lives; one of them glorying in his
talents for stratagem and invention, and communicating to the other,
in confidence, all the secret purposes of an intriguing head and
resolute heart.
But here it will be proper to observe, for the sake of such as may
apprehend hurt to the morals of youth, from the more freely-written
letters, that the gentlemen, though professed libertines as to the
female sex, and making it one of their wicked maxims, to keep no
faith with any of the individuals of it, who are thrown into their
power, are not, however, either infidels or scoffers; nor yet such
as think themselves freed from the observance of those other moral
duties which bind man to man.
On the contrary, it will be found, in the progress of the work, that
they very often make such reflections upon each other, and each upon
himself and his own actions, as reasonable beings must make, who
disbelieve not a future state of rewards and punishments, and who one
day propose to reform--one of them actually reforming, and by that
means giving an opportunity to censure the freedoms which fall from
the gayer pen and lighter heart of the other.
And yet that other, although in unbosoming himself to a select friend,
he discover wickedness enough to entitle him to general detestation,
preserves a decency, as well in his images as in his language, which
is not always to be found in the works of some of the most celebrated
modern writers, whose subjects and characters have less warranted
the liberties they have taken.
In the letters of the two young ladies, it is presumed, will be found
not only the highest exercise of a reasonable and practicable
friendship, between minds endowed with the noblest principles of
virtue and religion, but occasionally interspersed, such delicacy of
sentiments, particularly with regard to the other sex; such instances
of impartiality, each freely, as a fundamental principle of their
friendship, blaming, praising, and setting right the other, as are
strongly to be recommended to the observation of the younger part
(more specially) of female readers.
The principle of these two young ladies is proposed as an exemplar to
her sex. Nor is it any objection to her being so, that she is not in
all respects a perfect character. It was not only natural, but it was
necessary, that she should have some faults, were it only to show the
reader how laudably she could mistrust and blame herself, and carry to
her own heart, divested of self-partiality, the censure which arose
from her own convictions, and that even to the acquittal of those,
because revered characters, whom no one else would acquit, and to
whose much greater faults her errors were owing, and not to a
weak or reproachable heart. As far as it is consistent with human
frailty, and as far as she could be perfect, considering the people
she had to deal with, and those with whom she was inseparably
connected, she is perfect. To have been impeccable, must have left