I suppose an account of my high crimes and misdemeanours, banishment, &c. &c. have already reached your ears; but while my brethren in transportation are offering up their wishes and their hopes on the shore, to the unpropitious god of winds, indulge me in the garrulity of egotism, and suffer me to correct the overcharged picture of that arch charicature _report_, by giving you a correct _ebauche_ of the recent circumstances of my useless life. When I gave you convoy as far as Dover, on your way to France, I returned to London, to “Surfeit on the same and yawn my joys----” And was again soon plunged in that dreadful vacillation of mind from which your society and conversation had so lately redeemed me. Vibrating between an innate propensity to _rights_ and an habitual adherence to _wrong_; sick of pursuits I was too indolent to relinqush, and linked to vice, yet still enamoured of virtue; weary of the useless, joyless inanity of my existence, yet without energy, without power to regenerate my worthless being; daily losing ground in the minds of the inestimable few who were still interested for my welfare; nor compensating for the loss, by the gratification of any one feeling in my own heart, and held up as an object of fashionable popularity for sustaining that character, which of all others I most despised; my taste impoverished by a vicious indulgence, my senses palled by repletion, my heart chill and unawakened, every appetite depraved and pampered into satiety, I fled from myself, as the object of my own utter contempt and detestation, and found a transient pleasurable inebriety in the well practised blandishments of Lady C----. You who alone know me, who alone have _openly_ condemned, and _secretly_ esteemed me, you who have wisely culled the blossom of pleasure, while I have sucked its poison, know that I am rather a _méchant par air_, than from any irresistible propensity to indiscriminate libertinism. In fact, the _original sin_ of my nature militates against the hackneyed modes of hackneyed licentiousness; for I am too profound a voluptuary to feel any exquisite gratification from such gross pursuits as the “_swinish multitude_” of fashion ennoble with that name of little understood, _pleasure_. Misled in my earliest youth by “passion’s meteor ray,” even then my heart called (but called in vain,) for a thousand delicious refinements to give poignancy to the mere transient impulse of sense.