of the forms, and inexperience in the manners of the world, occasion
all the little incidents which these volumes record, and which form
the natural progression of the life of a young woman of obscure birth,
but conspicuous beauty, for the first six months after her Entrance
into the world.

Perhaps, were it possible to effect the total extirpation of novels,
our young ladies in general, and boarding-school damsels in particular,
might profit from their annihilation; but since the distemper they
have spread seems incurable, since their contagion bids defiance
to the medicine of advice or reprehension, and since they are found
to baffle all the mental art of physic, save what is prescribed by
the slow regimen of Time, and bitter diet of Experience; surely all
attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read,
if not with advantage, at least without injury, ought rather to be
encouraged than contemned.

Let me, therefore, prepare for disappointment those who, in the perusal
of these sheets, entertain the gentle expectation of being transported
to the fantastic regions of Romance, where Fiction is coloured by all
the gay tints of luxurious Imagination, where Reason is an outcast,
and where the sublimity of the Marvellous rejects all aid from
sober Probability. The heroine of these memoirs, young, artless,
and inexperienced, is

No faultless Monster that the world ne'er saw;

but the offspring of Nature, and of Nature in her simplest attire.

In all the Arts, the value of copies can only be proportioned to the