CHAPTER XVI


_Education still progressive: A widow's continence: Religious fervour:
A methodist sermon: Olivia in danger: Love dreams: Fanatic horrors:
Present disgrace, and honours delayed_


During the short period of my absence from my native home, I had been
taught two additional and essential lessons: the first, that men are
not all as good as they might be; and the second, that I was not quite
so wise as I had supposed myself. Having once been duped, the thought
occurred that it was possible I might be duped again, and I thus
acquired some small degree of what is called worldly caution. At once
to display one vice and teach another, to expose fraud and inspire
suspicion, is, to an unadulterated mind, a severe and odious lesson;
and, when repeated too often, is in danger of inculcating a mistake
infinitely more pernicious than that of credulity; that is, a
conviction that man is depraved by nature, and a total forgetfulness
that he is merely the creature of habit and accident.

Hitherto I had met disappointment; but I had found novelty; and though
it was not the novelty I expected, yet it was invigorating: it kept
me awake. The qualities for which I most valued myself no one indeed
seemed to notice. But the world was before me; I had seen but little
of it; my own feelings assured me genius and virtue had a real
existence, and sometime or another I should find them.