Page:Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749, vol. 2).pdf/256

 and comparing its infamous blandishments with the infinitely superior joys of innocence, I could not help pitying, even in point of taste, those who, immers'd in a gross sensuality, are insensible to the so delicate charms of, than which even has not a greater friend, nor than  a greater enemy. Thus temperance makes men lords over those pleasures that intemperance enslaves them to: the one, parent of health, vigour, fertility, chearfulness, and every other desirable good in life, the other, of diseases, debility, barrenness, self-loathing, with only every evil incident to human nature.

You laugh perhaps at this tail-piece of morality, express'd from me by the force, of truth, resulting from compar'd experiences: you think it, no doubt, out of place; out of character: possibly too you may look on it as the paultry finesse of one who seeks to mask a devotee to Vice under a rag of a veil, impudently smuggled from the shrine of Virtue; just as