I am not sorry it was not printed. On re-reading
it I find passages here and there which are unconscious and
unavoidable imitations of Dr. Johnson. No use in re-writing them
now.
J. R.
June 1760.
Sir,--I venture to send you a part of the history of my life,
trusting that my example may be a warning against confidence in our
own strength to resist even the meanest temptation.
My father was a prosperous haberdasher in Cheapside, and I was his
eldest son. My mother was the daughter of the clerk to the
Fellmongers' Company. She had reached the mature age of nine-and-
twenty when she received an offer of matrimony from my father, and
after much anxious consideration and much consultation with her
parents, prudently decided to accept it, although to the end of her
days she did not scruple openly to declare that she had lowered
herself by marrying a man who was compelled to bow behind a counter
to the wife of a grocer, and stand bareheaded at the carriage door
of an alderman's lady. My mother, I am sorry to say, abetted my
natural aversion from trade and sent me to Saint Paul's School to
learn Latin, Greek, and the mathematicks that I might be qualified
to separate myself from the class to which unhappily she was
degraded and that she might recover in her child the pride she had
lost in her husband.
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