losing all that honest pride, that modest confidence, in which the
virgin dignity consists. Nor does my misfortune stop here: though many
would be too generous to impute the follies of a father to a child whose
heart has set her above them; yet I am afraid the most charitable of
them will hardly think it possible for me to be a daily spectatress of
his vices without tacitly allowing them, and at last consenting to them,
as the eye of the frightened infant is, by degrees, reconciled to the
darkness of which at first it was afraid.

It is a common opinion, he himself must very well know, that vices, like
diseases, are often hereditary; and that the property of the one is to
infect the manners, as the other poisons the springs of life.

Yet this, though bad, is not the worst; my father deceives himself in
the hopes of the very child he has brought into the world; he suffers
his house to be the seat of drunkenness, riot, and irreligion, who
seduces, almost in my sight, the menial servant, converses with the
prostitute, and corrupts the wife! Thus I, who from my earliest dawn of
reason was taught to think that at my approach every eye sparkled with
pleasure, or was dejected as conscious of superior charms, am excluded
from society, through fear lest I should partake, if not of my father's
crimes, at least of his reproach. Is a parent, who is so little
solicitous for the welfare of a child, better than a pirate who turns a
wretch adrift in a boat at sea, without a star to steer by, or an anchor
to hold it fast? Am I not to lay all my miseries at those doors which
ought to have been opened only for my protection? And if doomed to add
at last one more to the number of those wretches whom neither the world
nor its law befriends, may I not justly say that I have been awed by a
parent into ruin? But though a parent's power is screened from insult
and violation by the very words of Heaven, yet surely no laws, divine or
human, forbid me to remove myself from the malignant shade of a plant
that poisons all around it, blasts the bloom of youth, checks its
improvements, and makes all its flowrets fade; but to whom can the
wretched, can the dependant fly? For me to fly a father's house, is to
be a beggar: I have only one comfort amidst my anxieties, a pious
relation, who bids me appeal to Heaven for a witness to my just
intentions, fly as a deserted wretch to its protection; and, being asked
who my father is, point, like the ancient ph