The novels of Charles Brockden Brown, consisting of Wieland;or, The transformation. Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the year 1793. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a sleep-walker. Jane Talbot. Ormond; or, The secret witness. Clara Howard; or, The enthusiasm of love. With a memoir of the author.

THE SECRET WITNESS.

207

must I clearly discern and fervently love the excellence
discovered in my fellow-beings, and industriously promote their improvement and felicity.
From my infancy to my seventeenth year, I lived in
the house of Mr. Dudley. On the day of my birth I was
deserted by my mother. Her temper was more akin to
that of tigress than woman. Yet that is unjust; for
beasts cherish their offspring. No natures but human
are capable of that depravity which makes insensible to
the claims of innocence and helplessness.
But let me not recall her to memory. Have I not
enough of sorrow? Yet to omit my causes of disquiet,
the unprecedented forlornness of my condition, and the
persecutions of an unnatural parent, would be to leave
my character a problem, and the sources of my love of
Miss Dudley unexplored. Yet I must not dwell upon
that complication of iniquities, that savage ferocity and
unextinguishable hatred of me, which characterized my
unhappy mother.
I was not safe under the protection of Mr. Dudley,
nor happy in the caresses of his daughter. My mother
asserted the privilege of that relation: she laboured for
years to obtain the control of my person and actions, to
snatch me from a peaceful and chaste asylum, and detain me in her own house, where, indeed, I should not
have been in want of raiment and food, but whereO my mother! Let me not dishonour thy name! Yet
it is not in my power to enhance thy infamy. Thy
crimes, unequalled as they were, were perhaps expiated
by thy penitence. Thy offences are too well known;
but perhaps they who witnessed thy freaks of intoxication, thy defiance of public shame, the enormity of thy
pollutions, the infatuation that made thee glory in the
pursuit of a loathsome and detestable trade, may be
strangers to the remorse and the abstinence which
accompanied the close of thy ignominious life.
For ten years was my peace incessantly molested by
the menaces or machinations of my mother. The Ipnger
she meditated my destruction, the more tenacious of her
purpose and indefatigable in her efforts she became.
'Tiat my mind was harassed with perpetual alarms was