PART I.
A
JOURNEY TO INDIA, &c.
LETTER I.
My dear Frederick,
The tenderness of a fond father’s heart admonishes me, that I should but poorly requite the affectionate solicitude you have so often expressed, to become acquainted with the particulars of my journey over land to India, if I any longer withheld from you an account of that singular and eventful period of my life. I confess to you, my dear boy, that often when I have endeavoured to amuse you with the leading incidents and extraordinary vicissitudes of fortune which chequered the whole of that series of adventures, and observed the eager attention with which, young though you were, you listened to the recital, the tender sensibility you disclosed at some passages, and the earnest desire you expressed that “I should the whole relate,” I have felt an almost irresistible impulse to indulge you with an accurate and faithful narrative, and have more than once sat down at my bureau for the purpose: but sober and deliberate reflection suggested that it was too soon, and that, by complying with your desire at such a very early period of your life, I should but render the great end that I proposed by it abortive, frustrate the instruction which I meant to convey, and impress the mere incident on your memory, while the moral deducible from it must necessarily evaporate, and leave no trace, or rather excite no idea, in a mind not sufficiently matured for the conception of abstract principles, or prepared by practice for the deduction of moral inferences.
I am aware that there are many people, who, contemplating only the number of your days, would consider my undertaking this arduous task, and offering it to your reflection, even now, premature: but this is a subject on which I have so long and so deliberately dwelt, which I have discussed with so much care, and examined with such impartiality, that I think I may be acquitted of vanity, though I say I am competent to form a judgment on it. The result of that judgment is, that I am determined to indulge you without further delay; and I trust that you will not, on your part, render it an empty indulgence, but, on the contrary, by turning every circumstance to its best use, by converting every feeling which these pages may excite in your heart into matter of serious reflection, and by making every event (as it happens to deserve) an example to promote either emulation on the one hand, or circumspection and caution on the other, justify me in that opinion of you on which I found this determination.