ed
names. When I was a little girl, it was the perpetual subject of my
contemplation, that I was an heiress, and the daughter of a baronet;
that my mother was the honourable lady Harriot; that we had a nobler
mansion, infinitely finer pleasure-grounds, and equipages more
splendid than any of the neighbouring families. Indeed, my good
friends, having observed nothing of this error of mine in either of
the lives which have hitherto been related, I am ashamed to confess
what a proud child I once was. How it happened I cannot tell, for
my father was esteemed the best bred man in the county, and the
condescension and affability of my mother were universally spoken of.

"Oh my dear friend," said miss ----, "it was very natural indeed, if
you supposed you possessed these advantages. We make no comparative
figure in the county, and my father was originally a man of no
consideration at all; and yet I can assure you, both he and mamma had
a prodigious deal of trouble to break me of this infirmity, when I was
very young." "And do reflect for a moment," said miss Villiers, "from
whence could proceed any pride in me--a poor curate's daughter;--at
least any pride worth speaking of; for the difficulty my father had to
make me feel myself on an equality with a miller's little daughter who
visited me, did not seem an anecdote worth relating. My father, from
his profession, is accustomed to look into these things, and whenever
he has observed any tendency to this fault in me, and has made me
sensible of my error, I, who am rather a weak-spirited girl, have been
so much distressed at his reproofs, that to restore me to my own good
opinion, he would make me sensible that pride is a defect inseparable
from human nature; shewing me, in our visits to the poorest labourers,
how pride would, as he expressed it, "prettily peep out from under
their ragged garbs."--My father dearly loved the poor. In persons of
a rank superior to our own humble one, I wanted not much assistance
from my father's nice discernment to know that it existed there; and
for these latter he would always claim that toleration from me, which
he said he observed I was less willing to allow than to the former
instances. "We are told in holy writ," he would say, "that it is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a
rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven." Surely this is not
meant alone to warn the affluent: it must also be understood as an
expressi