What am I writing?—­I must collect my thoughts.  I do not know that any will peruse these pages except you, my friend, who will receive them at my death.  I do not address them to you alone because it will give me pleasure to dwell upon our friendship in a way that would be needless if you alone read what I shall write.  I shall relate my tale therefore as if I wrote for strangers.  You have often asked me the cause of my solitary life; my tears; and above all of my impenetrable and unkind silence.  In life I dared not; in death I unveil the mystery.  Others will toss these pages lightly over:  to you, Woodville, kind, affectionate friend, they will be dear—­the precious memorials of a heart-broken girl who, dying, is still warmed by gratitude towards you:[5] your tears will fall on the words that record my misfortunes; I know they will—­and while I have life I thank you for your sympathy.

But enough of this.  I will begin my tale:  it is my last task, and I hope I have strength sufficient to fulfill it.  I record no crimes; my faults may easily be pardoned; for they proceeded not from evil motive but from want of judgement; and I believe few would say that they could, by a different conduct and superior wisdom, have avoided the misfortunes to which I am the victim.  My fate has been governed by necessity, a hideous necessity.  It required hands stronger than mine; stronger I do believe than any human force to break the thick, adamantine chain that has bound me, once breathing nothing but joy, ever possessed by a warm love & delight in goodness,—­to misery only to be ended, and now about to be ended, in death.  But I forget myself, my tale is yet untold.  I will pause a few moments, wipe my dim eyes, and endeavour to lose the present obscure but heavy feeling of unhappiness in the more acute emotions of the past.[6]

I was born in England.  My father was a man of rank:[7] he had lost his father early, and was educated by a weak mother with all the indulgence she thought due to a nobleman of wealth.  He was sent to Eton and afterwards to college; & allowed from childhood the free use of large sums of money; thus enjoying from his earliest youth the independance which a boy with these advantages, always acquires at a public school.

Under the influence of these circumstances his passions found a deep soil wherein they might strike their roots and flourish either as flowers or weeds as was their nature.  By being always allowed to act for himself his character became strongly and early marked and exhibited a various surface on which a quick sighted observer might see the seeds of virtues and of misfortunes.  His careless extravagance, which made him squander immense sums of money to satisfy passing whims, which from their apparent energy he dignified with the name of passions, often displayed itself in unbounded generosity.  Yet while he earnestly occupied himself about the wants of others his own desires were gratified to their fullest extent.  He gave his money, but none of his own wishes were sacrifised to his gifts; he gave his time, which he did not value, and his affections which he was happy in any manner to have called into action.