Truth! stark, naked truth, is the word; and I will not
so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze
wrapper on it, but paint situations such as they actually
rose to me in nature, careless of violating those laws of
decency that were never made for such unreserved intimacies
as ours; and you have too much sense, too much knowledge of
the ORIGINALS themselves, to sniff prudishly and out of
character at the PICTURES of them. The greatest men, those
of the first and most leading taste, will not scruple adorning
their private closets with nudities, though, in compliance
with vulgar prejudices, they may not think them decent deco-
rations of the staircase, or salon.
This, and enough, premised, I go souse into my personal
history. My maiden name was Frances Hill. I was born at a
small village near Liverpool, in Lancashire, of parents ex-
tremely poor, and, I piously believe, extremely honest.
My father, who had received a maim on his limbs that
disabled him from following the more laborious branches of
country-drudgery, got, by making of nets, a scanty subsis-
tence, which was not much enlarg'd by my mother's keeping
a little day-school for the girls in her neighbourhood.
They had had several children; but none lived to any age
except myself, who had received from nature a constitution
perfectly healthy.
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