And was again soon plunged in that dreadful vacillation of mind from which your society and conversation had so lately redeemed me.     

       Vibrating between an innate propensity to rights and an habitual adherence to wrong; sick of pursuits I was too indolent to relinqush, and linked to vice, yet still enamoured of virtue; weary of the useless, joyless inanity of my existence, yet without energy, without power to regenerate my worthless being; daily losing ground in the minds of the inestimable few who were still interested for my welfare; nor       compensating for the loss, by the gratification of any one feeling in my own heart, and held up as an object of fashionable popularity for sustaining that character, which of all others I most despised; my taste impoverished by a vicious indulgence, my senses palled by repletion, my heart chill and unawakened, every appetite depraved and pampered into satiety, I fled from myself, as the object of my own utter contempt and detestation, and found a transient pleasurable inebriety in the well practised blandishments of Lady C——.     

       You who alone know me, who alone have openly condemned, and secretly esteemed me, you who have wisely culled the blossom of pleasure, while I have sucked its poison, know that I am rather a méchant par air, than from any irresistible propensity to indiscriminate libertinism. In fact, the original sin of my nature militates against the hackneyed modes of hackneyed licentiousness; for I am too profound a voluptuary to feel any exquisite gratification from such gross pursuits as the “swinish multitude” of fashion ennoble with that name of little understood, pleasure. Misled in my earliest youth by “passion’s meteor ray,” even then my heart called (but called in vain,) for a thousand delicious refinements to give poignancy to the mere transient impulse of sense.     

       Oh! my dear friend, if in that sunny season of existence when the ardours of youth nourish in our bosom a thousand indescribable emotions of tenderness and love, it had been my fortunate destiny to have met with a being, who—but this is an idle regret, perhaps an idle supposition;—-the moment of ardent susceptibility is over, when woman becomes the sole spell which lures us to good or ill, and when her omnipotence, according to the bias of her own nature, and the organization of those feelings on which it operates, 

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