This idea led him into a train of unpleasant reflections, that concluded with lamenting his youthful rashness, and an ungovernable passion, of which he was the victim; nor could he help reverting to his father's connexion with the mother of Fatima and Claudina.
Could the libertine, or to speak in the softened term which fashion has established, could the man of gallantry look forward to the consequences of his errors; did he see the unfortunate innocents born of vicious parents; brought into the world under the stigma of criminality; subject to the eye of scorn;—nourished in vice; corrupted by example;—grow up lovely to the eye, but with minds depraved.—Subject to temptations, they have neither fortitude nor inclination to resist;—sink into a vortex of misery, guilty, hardened, despised, forsaken; and to close the climax, see those unfortunate children of guilty parents abandoned by the world; and when youth and beauty is no more, left to die in wretchedness, without relief, without pity,
