Sir,--I venture to send you a part of the history of my life,
trusting that my example may be a warning against confidence in our
own strength to resist even the meanest temptation.

My father was a prosperous haberdasher in Cheapside, and I was his
eldest son. My mother was the daughter of the clerk to the
Fellmongers' Company. She had reached the mature age of nine-and-
twenty when she received an offer of matrimony from my father, and
after much anxious consideration and much consultation with her
parents, prudently decided to accept it, although to the end of her
days she did not scruple openly to declare that she had lowered
herself by marrying a man who was compelled to bow behind a counter
to the wife of a grocer, and stand bareheaded at the carriage door
of an alderman's lady. My mother, I am sorry to say, abetted my
natural aversion from trade and sent me to Saint Paul's School to
learn Latin, Greek, and the mathematicks that I might be qualified
to separate myself from the class to which unhappily she was
degraded and that she might recover in her child the pride she had
lost in her husband. My abilities were not despicable, my ambition
was restless, and my progress in my studies was therefore
respectable. I conceived a genuine admiration for the classick
authors; I was genuinely moved by the majesty of Homer and the
felicity of expression in Horace. In due time I went to Oxford, and
after the usual course there, in which I was not unsuccessful, I
took Holy Orders and became a curate. When I was about eight-and-
twenty I was presented with a College living in the village of A.
about four miles from the county town of B. in the West of England.
My parishioners were the squire, a half-pay captain in the army, a
retired custom-house surveyor who was supposed to be the