{9} The Poor are here almost of necessity introduced, for they must be considered, in every place, as a large and interesting portion of its inhabitants.  I am aware of the great difficulty of acquiring just notions on the maintenance and management of this class of our fellow subjects, and I forbear to express any opinion of the various modes which have been discussed or adopted:  of one method only I venture to give my sentiments,—­that of collecting the poor of a hundred into one building.  This admission of a vast number of persons, of all ages and both sexes, of very different inclinations, habits, and capacities, into a society, must, at a first view I conceive, be looked upon as a cause of both vice and misery; nor does anything which I have heard or read invalidate the opinion:  happily, the method is not a prevailing one, as these houses are, I believe, still confined to that part of the kingdom where they originated.

{10} John Bunyan, in one of the many productions of his zeal, has ventured to make public this extraordinary sentiment, which the frigid piety of our Clerk so readily adopted.

{11} The Life of Ellen Orford, though sufficiently burdened with error and misfortune, has in it little besides which resembles those of the unhappy men in the preceding Letters, and is still more unlike that of Grimes, in a subsequent one.  There is in this character cheerfulness and resignation, a more uniform piety, and an immovable trust in the aid of religion.  This, with the light texture of the introductory part, will, I hope, take off from that idea of sameness which the repetition of crimes and distresses is likely to create.

{12} It has been a subject of greater vexation to me than such trifle ought to be, that I could not, without destroying all appearance of arrangement, separate these melancholy narratives, and place the fallen Clerk in Office at a greater distance from the Clerk of the Parish, especially as they resembled each other in several particulars; both being tempted, seduced, and wretched.  Yet there are, I conceive, considerable marks of distinction:  their guilt is of different kind; nor would either have committed the offence of the other.  The Clerk of the Parish could break the commandment, but he could not have been induced to have disowned an article of that creed for which he had so bravely contended, and on which he fully relied; and the upright mind of the Clerk in Office would have secured him from being guilty of wrong and robbery, though his weak and vacillating intellect could not preserve him from infidelity and profaneness.  Their melancholy is nearly alike, but not its consequences.  Jachin retained hia belief, and though he hated life, he could never be induced to quit it voluntarily; but Abel was driven to terminate his misery in a way which the unfixedness of his religious opinions rather accelerated than retarded.  I am, therefore, not without hope, that the more observant of my readers will perceive many marks of discrimination in these characters.