if no extraordinary action had signalized the names of any of them, so none of them had been guilty of crimes to entail infamy on their posterity:  and that a moderate estate in the family had descended from father to son for many generations, without being either remarkably improved or embezzled.—­His immediate parents were in very easy circumstances, and he being their first son, was welcomed into the world with a joy usual on such occasions.—­I never heard that any prodigies preceded or accompanied his nativity; or that the planets, or his mother’s cravings during her pregnancy, had sealed him with any particular mark or badge of distinction:  but have been well assured he was a fine boy, sucked heartily of his mother’s milk, and what they call a thriving child.  His weaning, I am told, was attended by some little ailments, occasioned by his pining after the food to which he had been accustomed; but proper means being found to make him lose the memory of the breast, he soon recovered his flesh, increased in strength, and could go about the room at a year and some few months old, without the help of a leading-string.

Hitherto the passions, those powerful abettors, I had almost said sole authors of all human actions, operated but faintly, and could shew themselves only in proportion to the vigour of the animal frame.  Yet latent as they are, an observing eye may easily discover them in each of their different propensities, even from the most early infancy.  The eyes of Natura on any new and pleasing object, would denote by their sparkling a sensation of joy:—­Fear was visible in him by clinging to his nurse, and endeavouring to bury himself as it were in her bosom, at the sound of menaces he was not capable of understanding:—­That sorrow has a place among the first emotions of the soul, was demonstrable by the sighs which frequently would heave his little heart, long before it was possible for him either to know or to imagine any motives for them:—­That the seeds of avarice are born with us, by the eagerness with which he catched at money when presented to him, his clinching it fast in his hand, and the reluctance he expressed on being deprived of it:—­That anger, and impatience of controul, are inherent to our nature, might be seen in his throwing down with vehemence any favourite toy, rather than yield to resign it; and that spite and revenge are also but too much so, by his putting in practice all such tricks as his young invention could furnish, to vex any of the family who had happened to cross him:—­Even those tender inclinations, which afterwards bear the name of amorous, begin to peep out long before the difference of sex is thought on; as Natura proved by the preference he gave the girls over the boys who came to play with him, and his readiness to part with any thing to them.