CLARISSA;

OR,

~3

FA
10554

THE HISTORY OF A YOUNG LADY:

COMPREHENDING

THE MOST IMPORTANT CONCERNS

OF PRIVATE LIFE; AND PARTICULARLY SHEWING
THE DISTRESSES THAT MAY ATTEND THE
MISCONDUCT BOTH OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN,
IN RELATION TO MARRIAGE.

SONNET

TO THE

AUTHOR OF CLARISSA.

O MASTER of the heart! whose magic skill
The close recesses of the soul can find,
Can rouse, becalm, and terrify the mind,
Now melt with pity, now with anguish thrill;

Thy moral page while virtuous precepts fill,

Warm from the heart, to mend the age design'd, Wit, strength, truth, decency, are all combin'd To lead our youth to good, and guard from ill.

O long enjoy what thou so well hast won;
The grateful tribute of each honest heart,
Sincere, nor hackneyed in the ways of men:
At each distressful stroke their true tears run;
And Nature, unsophisticate by Art,

Owns and applauds the labours of thy pen.

Clarissa. 1.

1

PREFACE.

THE following History is given those other moral duties which in a Series of Letters, written bind man to man.

principally in a double, yet sepa- On the contrary, it will be found, rate correspondence;

Between two young ladies of virtue and honour, bearing an inviolable friendship for each other, and writing not merely for amusement, but upon the most interesting subjects; in which every private family, more or less, may find itself concerned: and,

Between two gentlemen of free lives; one of them glorying in his talents for stratagem and invention, and communicating to the other, in confidence, all the secret purposes of an intriguing head and resolute heart.

in the progress of the work, that they very often make such reflections upon each other, and each upon himself and his own actions, as reasonable beings must make, who disbelieve not a future state of rewards and punishments, and who one day propose to reform One of them actually reforming, and by that means giving an opportunity to censure the freedoms which fall from the gayer pen and lighter heart of the other.

And yet that other, although in unbosoming himself to a select friend, he discovers wickedness But here it will be proper to ob- enough to entitle him to general serve, for the sake of such as may detestation, preserves a decency, apprehend hurt to the morals of as well in his images as in his youth, from the more freely language, which is not always to written letters that the gentle- be found in the works of some men, though professed libertines of the most celebrated modern as to the female sex, and making writers, whose subjects and charit one of their wicked maxims, to acters have less warranted the keep no faith with any of the in- liberties they have taken. dividuals of it, who are thrown In the letters of the two young into their power, are not, how- ladies, it is presumed, will be ever, either infidels or scoffers; found not only the highest exernor yet such as think themselves cise of a reasonable and practicable freed from the observance of friendship, between minds en