is race? Why should he wish to expose his children to the
scorn and insults of the rest of the world? Why should he, whether they
are sons or daughters, lay them under the necessity of complying with
proposals of marriage, either inferior as to fortune, or unequal as to
age? Why should he deprive the children he loves, who themselves may be
guilty of no fault, of the respect they would wish to have, and to
deserve; and of the opportunity of associating themselves with proper,
that is to say, with reputable company? and why should he make them think
themselves under obligation to every person of character, who will
vouchsafe to visit them? What little reason, in a word, would such
children have to bless their father's obstinate defiance of the laws and
customs of his country; and for giving them a mother, of whom they could
not think with honour; to whose crime it was that they owed their very
beings, and whose example it was their duty to shun?

If the education and morals of these children are left to chance, as too
generally they are, (for the man who has humanity and a feeling heart,
and who is capable of fondness for his offspring, I take it for granted
will marry,) the case is still worse; his crime is perpetuated, as I may
say, by his children: and the sea, the army, perhaps the highway, for the
boys; the common for the girls; too often point out the way to a worse
catastrophe.

What therefore, upon the whole, do we get by treading in these crooked
paths, but danger, disgrace, and a too-late repentance?

And after all, do we not frequently become the cullies of our own
libertinism; sliding into the very state with those half-worn-out doxies,
which perhaps we might have entered into with their ladies; at least with
their superiors both in degree and fortune? and all the time lived
handsomely like ourselves; not sneaking into holes and corners; and, when
we crept abroad with our women, looking about us, and at ever one that
passed us, as if we were confessedly accountable to the censures of all
honest people.

My cousin Tony Jenyns, thou knewest. He had not the actively mischievous
spirit, that thou, Belton, Mowbray, Tourville, and myself, have: but he
imbibed the same notions we do, and carried them into practice.

How did he prate against wedlock! how did he strut about as a wit and a
smart! and what a wit and a smart did all the boys and girls of our
family (myself among the rest, then an urchin) think h