Old Peter, their father, was a man of mean birth, and of a sort of accidental education.  From his youth up he had lived in Oxford, and from the time he was able to know anything, within the purlieus of a college, from whence he had gleaned up a few Latin sentences, scraps of poetry, and as the masterpiece of his improvements, had acquired a good knack of punning.  All these mighty qualifications were bent to keep a good house, and drinking two or three quarts of strong ale, accompanied with a song, and two or three hours’ scraping at night.  The mother, again, was the last remnant of a decayed family, who charged its ruin on the Civil Wars.  She was exceedingly puffed up with the notions of her birth, and the respect that was due to a person not sprung from the vulgar.  Her education had extended no farther than the knowledge of preserving, pickling and making fricasees, a pretty exact knowledge in the several kinds of points and a judgment not to be despised in the choice of lace, silks and ribbons.  She affected extravagance that she might not appear mean, and troublesomely ceremonious that she might not seem to want good manners.  Clothes for herself and her daughters, a good quantity of china and some other exuberances of a fancy almost turned mad with the love of finery, made up the circle of what took up her thoughts, the daughters participating in their parents’ tempers.  But what was wonderful indeed, the sons were honest, sober, industrious young men.

In the midst of all this mirth and splendour, the father died, and left them all totally without support other than their own industry could procure for them, slender provision indeed!  Miss Molly, the eldest, was about twenty-two at the time of her father’s death, and her sisters were each of them younger than her, and Alice a year younger than Jenny, and about eighteen.  The mother was at her wits’ end to know how to procure a living for herself and them, but an old gentleman in one of the colleges, to whom Peter had been very useful, and who therefore retained a grateful sense of his service, was so kind as to give fifty pounds towards putting out the daughters, and took care to see the youngest Alice placed with a mantua-maker in London.  Molly fell into a consumption, as was generally said, for the love of a young gentleman who used to spend his evenings at her father’s, and who marrying a young lady of suitable birth and fortune to himself, was retired into Shropshire.  Jenny ran away with a servitor, and was lost to her mother and her friends; so that Alice had it in her power to be tolerably provided for, if she had inclined to have lived virtuously, and not to have frustrated the offers of a good fortune.  But she was wild and silly from her cradle, born without capacity to do good to herself, and indued only with such cunning as served her to ruin others.