me, with the seeds of a disorder that has
gathered strength with years, and from which I am now relieved at
intervals, only to suffer a different, though more intolerable evil.
I owed my preservation to one of my father's sisters, an amiable and
virtuous girl, who took the most tender care of me; she is yet living,
nursing, at the age of four--score, a husband younger than herself, but
worn out with excessive drinking. Dear aunt! I freely forgive your
having preserved my life, and only lament that it is not in my power to
bestow on the decline of your days the tender solicitude and care you
lavished on the first dawn of mine. My nurse, Jaqueline, is likewise
living: and in good health--the hands that opened my eyes to the light of
this world may close them at my death. We suffer before we think; it is
the common lot of humanity. I experienced more than my proportion of it.
I have no knowledge of what passed prior to my fifth or sixth year; I
recollect nothing of learning to read, I only remember what effect the
first considerable exercise of it produced on my mind; and from that
moment I date an uninterrupted knowledge of myself.

Every night, after supper, we read some part of a small collection of
romances which had been my mother's. My father's design was only to
improve me in reading, and he thought these entertaining works were
calculated to give me a fondness for it; but we soon found ourselves so
interested in the adventures they contained, that we alternately read
whole nights together, and could not bear to give over until at the
conclusion of a volume. Sometimes, in a morning, on hearing the swallows
at our window, my father, quite ashamed of this weakness, would cry,
"Come, come, let us go to bed; I am more a child than thou art."

I soon acquired, by this dangerous custom, not only an extreme facility
in reading and comprehending, but, for my age, a too intimate
acquaintance with the passions. An infinity of sensations were familiar
to me, without possessing any precise idea of the objects to which they
related--I had conceived nothing--I had felt the whole. This confused
succession of emotions did not retard the future efforts of my reason,
though they added an extravagant, romantic notion of human life, which
experience and reflection have never been able to eradicate.

My romance reading concluded with the summer of 1719, the following
winter was differently employed. My mother's library being