ng
to be interesting. I hope to see you about ten days after you receive
this; and if you could bring me a Cachemire shawl, it would give me
great pleasure to see your taste in its choice. God bless you, my dear
son.

"Your very affectionate

"Frances Pelham."

"P.S. I hope you go to church sometimes: I am sorry to see the young men
of the present day so irreligious. Perhaps you could get my old friend,
Madame De--, to choose the Cachemire--take care of your health."

This letter, which I read carefully twice over, threw me into a most
serious meditation. My first feeling was regret at leaving Paris; my
second, was a certain exultation at the new prospects so unexpectedly
opened to me. The great aim of a philosopher is, to reconcile every
disadvantage by some counterbalance of good--where he cannot create
this, he should imagine it. I began, therefore, to consider less what
I should lose than what I should gain, by quitting Paris. In the first
place, I was tolerably tired of its amusements: no business is half so
fatiguing as pleasure. I longed for a change: behold, a change was at
hand! Then, to say truth, I was heartily glad of a pretence of escaping
from a numerous cohort of folles amours, with Madame D'Anville at the
head; and the very circumstance which men who play the German flute and
fall in love, would have considered the most vexatious, I regarded as
the most consolatory.

There was yet another reason which reconciled me more than any other to
my departure. I had, in my residence at Paris, among half wits and
whole roues, contracted a certain--not exactly grossierete--but want of
refinement--a certain coarseness of expression and idea which, though
slight, and easily thrown off, took in some degree from my approach to
that character which I wished to become. I know nothing which would
so polish the manners as continental intercourse, were it not for the
English debauches with which that intercourse connects one. English
profligacy is always coarse, and in profligacy nothing is more
contagious than its tone. One never keeps a restraint on the manner when
one unbridles the passions, and one takes from the associates with whom
the latter are indulged, the air and the method of the indulgence.

I was, the reader well knows, too solicitous for improvement, not to be
anxious to escape from such chances of deterioration, and I therefore
consoled myself with considerable facility for the pleasures and the
asso