Volume 2

Portraits and lives of remarkable and eccentric characters.

Date:
[1819?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Portraits and lives of remarkable and eccentric characters. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    that any person, after a temperate use of life, a series of thinking and acting regularly, and without one single deviation from sobriety, should plunge into the very depth of profligacy, precipitately, and at once, is altogether improbable, and unprecedented, and ab¬ solutely inconsistent with the course of things. Man¬ kind is never corrupted at once; villany is always progressive, and declines from right, step after step, till every regard of probity is lost, and every sense of all moral obligation totally perishes. “ Again, my lord, a suspicion of this kind, which nothing but malevolence could entertain, and igno¬ rance propagate, is violently opposed by my very situation at that time, with respect to health; for, but a little space before, I had been confined to my bed, and suffered under a very long and severe disorder, and was not able, for half-a-year together, so much as to walk. The distemper left me, indeed, yet slowly, and in part; but so macerated, so enfeebled, that I was reduced to crutches; and so far from being well about the time I am charged with this fact, that I never, to this day, perfectly recovered. Could then a person in this condition take any thing into his head so unlikely, so extravagant? I past the vigor of my age, feeble and valetudinary, with no inducement to engage, no ability to accomplish, no weapon where¬ with to perpetrate such a fact; without interest, with¬ out power, without motive, without means. “ Besides, it must needs occur to every one, that