Possessed of these views and feelings, so unsuitable to the cold maxims of the world, and with a weak and irritable constitution, I was ill prepared for the loss which was now, when I was in my twentieth year, impending over me--the death of both my parents, who, attacked by the same disease--some putrid species of typhus--died within a week of each other, leaving me, their only child, as much unprovided for in regard to worldly wants, as I was unfitted for making up the deficiency by my personal exertions. My father left nothing but the furniture in the manse, which was all required to pay up some advances of stipend which had been made to him by several of the heritors, and which the extreme scantiness of his income necessitated him to have recourse to. I was a beggar, imbued with notions to make the people of the world admire and pity, and gifted with a countenance so beautiful (why need I spare the vain word, when I now admit that age and pain have made me ugly?), that, with art, might have realised a fortune, or, with folly, might have ruined me. I sought the protection of a spendthrift uncle and a good aunt--the latter resident in the town of Stirling, an old lady of fortune, a Mrs Greville, who admired my principles, and possessed generosity enough to enable her to offer to repay the pleasures of my companionship by her house and her friendship. My tender frame, operated upon by the intense grief I had felt in the loss of my parents, sustained a shock which would have proved fatal to me, if the assuasive attentions of that angelic being had not contributed to the recovery of my health. Her protection was much, her kindness valuable; but above all was I blessed in the possession of a friend who reduced to practice, though she could not _feel_ as I felt, the principles of virtue I had so long cherished with the fondness of a ruling passion. But my situation was now changed. In my father's manse I saw little of the world; but what came under my observation was congenial to my mind, and gratified my feelings by the exhibition of goodness as well of deed as of sentiment. The evil I saw was out-of-doors, and I eschewed it as a serpent which would beguile by the spiral turns of its insidious lines of beauty, and the shining hues of the colours of false loveliness. In our society at home, or in the houses of the parishioners, it never came under my experience, except by the report of crimes which grated on my irritable feelings, and pained me to a much greater extent than people of ordinary sensibilities may well comprehend. In my new residence, I was necessitated to mix with the world. My aunt saw much company, composed of the mixed inhabitants of the town, and I accompanied her to various parties where the _fashionable_ vices were cultivated, as all fashionable things are, with an affected contempt of honest plainness and unadorned simplicity.