ng taste,
will not scruple adorning their private closets with nudities, though,
in compliance with vulgar prejudices, they may not think them decent
decorations of the staircase, or salon.

This, and enough, premised, I go souse into my personal history.
My maiden name was Frances Hill. I was born at a small village near
Liverpool, in Lancashire, of parents extremely poor, and, I piously
believe, extremely honest.

My father, who had received a maim on his limbs, that disabled him
from following the more laborious branches of country drudgery, got,
by making nets, a scanty subsistence, which was not much enlarged by my
mother's keeping a little day-school for the girls in her neighborhood.
They had had several children; but none lived to any age except myself,
who had received from nature a constitution perfectly healthy.

My education, till past fourteen, was no better than very vulgar:
reading, or rather spelling, an illegible scrawl, and a little ordinary
plain work, composed the whole system of it; and then all my foundation
in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice, and the shy
timidity general to our sex, in the tender age of life, when objects
alarm or frighten more by their novelty than anything else. But then,
this is a fear too often cured at the expense of innocence, when Miss,
by degrees, begins no longer to look on a man as a creature of prey that
will eat her.

My poor mother had divided her time so entirely between her scholars
and her little domestic cares, that she had spared very little to my
instruction, having, from her own innocence from all ill, no hint or
thought of guarding me against any.

I was now entering on my fifteenth year, when the worst of ills befell
me in the loss of my fond, tender parents, who were both carried off by
the small-pox, within a few days of each other; my father dying first,
and thereby by hastening the death of my mother: so that I was now left
an unhappy friendless orphan (for my father's coming to settle there,
was accidental, he being originally a Kentisrman). That cruel distemper
which had proved so fatal to them, had indeed seized me, but with such
mild and favourable symptoms, that I was presently out of danger, and
what then I did not know the value of, was entirely unmarked I skip over
here an account of the natural grief and affliction which I felt on
this melancholy occasion. A little time, and the giddiness of that age,
dissipated too soon