I am honoured by the attention with which you have
perused my work, and obliged for the hints you have suggested for its
improvement. I am at all times open to conviction, but particularly so, when I
observe great nicety of judgment united to great kind-
| 346 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
Your apprehension that some of my readers will suspect the work of being tainted with the philosophy of the new school of French moralists, and of promulgating Deistical principles, give me leave to say, I think unfounded. I solemnly assure you I am wholly unacquainted with the works of the persons alluded to (except a very partial perusal of Helvetius and the travels of M. Volney come under that head); the habits of my life and situation have all thrown me dependent on my own mind, and have been as favourable to the study of Nature in her moral operations and an admiration of her works in their spirit and their forms, as they have been inimical to that description of information and system which books are calculated to bestow.
Whatever, therefore, are my errors, they are exclusively
my own; are, consequently, free from the criticisms of common-place imitation,
and in an age when human intellect has nearly readied its god of attainment,
the writer who has (in the least degree) the power to be original, inevitably possesses the spell to be attractive. Were I writing for certain sects,
or for a certain class in society only, some part of
your appre-
| FIRST TASTE OF CRITICISM. | 347 |
| 348 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
If I have, in the hurry of composition, asserted that the
union of social and selfish love constitute the perfection of human Nature, I
have written nonsense, for the union might exist upon very unequal terms, and
the selfish preponderate very much over the social.
I meant to assert that the subjection of the selfish passions to the social or
general good of mankind constituted the perfection of human Virtue; but of human virtue, I do not believe that any peculiar mode of
faith is to be considered, as it must be admitted that a Brahmin or Mussulman,
a Catholic or Protestant, may all be perfectly virtuous men, though they differ
in points of faith, and that a man who promotes the happiness of his fellow
creature is a virtuous man, even though he is a Jew, which is but his
misfortune, and it might have been yours sir, or mine, had we been born of
parents of that persuasion; for, after all, we must confess, that our religion
is more frequently our inheritance than our conviction;
though it may be both—and certainly, when Mr.
Pope asserted, that “his faith can’t be wrong
whose life is in the
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