ings which grow out of their
very natures that are pardonable, nay becoming, when considered as such,
but without that reflection must give the quickest pain and vexation. To
manage well a great family is as worthy an instance of capacity, as to
execute a great employment; and for the generality, as women perform the
considerable part of their duties as well as men do theirs, so in their
common behaviour, those of ordinary genius are not more trivial than the
common rate of men; and in my opinion, the playing of a fan is every
whit as good an entertainment as the beating a snuff-box.

But however I have rambled in this libertine manner of writing by way of
essay, I now sat down with an intention to represent to my readers, how
pernicious, how sudden, and how fatal surprises of passion are to the
mind of man; and that in the more intimate commerces of life they are
most liable to arise, even in our most sedate and indolent hours.
Occurrences of this kind have had very terrible effects; and when one
reflects upon them, we cannot but tremble to consider what we are
capable of being wrought up to against all the ties of nature, love,
honour, reason, and religion, though the man who breaks through them
all, had, an hour before he did so, a lively and virtuous sense of their
dictates. When unhappy catastrophes make up part of the history of
princes, and persons who act in high spheres, or are represented in the
moving language and well-wrought scenes of tragedians, they do not fail
of striking us with terror; but then they affect us only in a transient
manner, and pass through our imaginations, as incidents in which our
fortunes are too humble to be concerned, or which writers form for the
ostentation of their own force; or, at most, as things fit rather to
exercise the powers of our minds, than to create new habits in them.
Instead of such high passages, I was thinking it would be of great use
(if anybody could hit it) to lay before the world such adventures as
befall persons not exalted above the common level. This, methought,
would better prevail upon the ordinary race of men, who are so
prepossessed with outward appearances, that they mistake fortune for
nature, and believe nothing can relate to them that does not happen to
such as live and look like themselves.

The unhappy end of a gentleman whose story an acquaintance of mine was
just now telling me, would be very proper for this end if it could be
related with all th