preferred a beautiful and good-humoured girl, to a boy possessed of
the same qualifications; but he was not ignorant that he did so, and
has often wondered (as he afterwards confessed) what it was that made
him feel so much pleasure, whenever, in innocently romping together,
he happened to catch hold of her in his arms; and what strange impulse
it was, that rendered him so reluctant to part with her out of that
posture, that she was obliged to struggle with all her strength to
disengage herself.

Hence it is plain, that the passion of love is part of our
composition, implanted in the soul for the propagation of the world;
and we ought not, in my opinion, to be too severe on the errors which,
meerly and abstracted from any other motive than itself, it sometimes
influences us to be guilty of.--The laws, indeed, which prohibit any
amorous intercourse between the sexes, unless authored by the
solemnities of marriage, are without all question, excellently well
calculated for the good of society, because without such a
restriction, there would be no such thing as order in the world. I am
therefore far from thinking lightly of that truly sacred institution,
when I say, that there are some cases, in which the pair so offending,
merit rather our pity, than that abhorrence which those of a more
rigid virtue, colder constitution, or less under the power of
temptation, are apt to testify on such occasion.

Rarely, however, it happens, that love is guilty of any thing capable
of being condemned, even by the most austere; most of the faults
committed under that sanction, being in reality instigated by some
other passion, such as avarice and ambition in the one sex, and a
flame which is too often confounded and mistaken for a pure affection
in the other.--Yet such is the ill-judging, or careless determination