nder a competent tutor.

In Paris the tutor dies, and the young man is left to the exercise of
his own discretion. Benighted in a wood, he finds shelter in a monastery
of noble ladies, where both the abbess and her sister fall in love with
him. After fluctuating between the two, he tries to elope with the
sister, is foiled by the abbess, and sets off again upon his travels. In
Italy he hears of his father's difficulties and starts for home, but
enters the French service instead. He is involved with a nobleman in an
attempt to abduct a lady from a nunnery, and would have been tortured
had not the jailor's wife eloped with him to England. There he enters
Parliament and is about to contract a fortunate marriage when he
incautiously defends the Chevalier in conversation, fights a duel, and,
although his antagonist is only wounded, he finds his reputation
blighted by the stigma of Jacobitism. After a long illness at Vienna
where he is pestered by Catholic priests, he recovers his health at Spa,
and falls in love with a young English girl. Her parents gladly give
their consent, but Maria seems unaccountably averse to the match. And
when our hero is assaulted by a jealous footman, he perceives that the
lady has fixed her affections on a lower object. Natura on his return to
England prospers and marries happily, but his joy is soon destroyed by
the death of his father and of his wife in giving birth to a son.
Consumed by ambition, the widower then marries the niece of a statesman,
only to discover what misery there is in a luxurious and unvirtuous
wife.

Natura soon experiences the passions of melancholy, grief, and revenge.
His son dies, and his wife's conduct forces him to divorce her. In the
hope of preventing his brother from inheriting his estate he is about to
marry a healthy country girl when he hears that his brother is dead and
that his sister's son is now his heir. Thereupon he buys off his
intended bride. At his sister's house he meets a young matron named
Charlotte, for whom he long entertains a platonic affection, but finally
marries her and has three sons. Thereafter he sinks into a calm and
natural decline and dies in his sixty-third year.

"Thus I have attempted to trace nature in all her mazy windings, and
shew life's progress through the passions, from the cradle to the
grave.--The various adventures which happened to Natura, I thought,
afforded a more ample field, than those of any one man I ever he