Letter IV. The Count de St. Julian to the Marquis of Pescara, Palermo

I rejoice with you sincerely upon the pleasures you begin to find in the city of Naples. May all the days of my Rinaldo be happy, and all his paths be strewed with flowers! It would have been truly to be lamented, that melancholy should have preyed upon a person so young and so distinguished by fortune, or that you should have sighed amid all the magnificence of Naples for the uncultivated plainness of Palermo. So long as I reside here, your absence will constantly make me feel an uneasy void, but it is my earnest wish that not a particle of that uneasiness may reach my friend.

Surely, my dear marquis, there are few correspondents so young as myself, and who address a personage so distinguished as you, that deal with so much honest simplicity, and devote so large a share of their communications to the forbidding seriousness of advice. But you have accepted the first effort of my friendship with generosity and candor, and you will, I doubt not, continue to behold my sincerity with a favorable eye.

Shall I venture to say that I am sorry you have commenced so intimate a connection with the marquis of San Severino? Even the character of him with which you have favored me, represents him to my wary sight as too agreeable not to be dangerous. But I have heard of him from others, a much more unpleasing account.

Alas, my friend, under how fair an outside are the most pernicious principles often concealed! Your honest heart would not suspect, that an appearance of politeness frequently covers the most rooted selfishness. The man who is all gentleness and compliance abroad, is often a tyrant among his domestics. The attendants upon a court put on their faces as they put on their clothes. And it is only after a very long acquaintance, after having observed them in their most unguarded hours, that you can make the smallest discovery of their real characters. Remember, my dear Rinaldo, the maxim of the incomparable philosopher of Geneva: “Man is not naturally amiable.” If the human character shews less pleasing and attractive in the obscurity of retreat, and among the unfinished personages of a college, believe me, the natives of a court are not a whit more disinterested, or have more of the reality of friendship. The true difference is, that the one wears a disguise, and the other appear as they are.

I do not mean however to impute all the faults I have mentioned to the marquis of San Severino. He is probably in the vulgar sense of the word good-natured. As you have already expressed it, he knows not how to refuse the requests, or contradict the present inclinations of those with whom he is connected. You say rightly that his gallantries are such as you can by no means approve. He is, if I am not greatly misinformed, in the utmost degree loose and debauched in his principles. The greater part of his time is spent in the haunts of intemperance, and under the roofs of the courtezan. I am afraid indeed he has gone farther than this, and that he has not scrupled to ruin innocence, and practice all the arts of seduction.

There is, my dear Rinaldo, a species of careless and youthful vice, that assumes the appearance of gentleness, and wears the garb of generosity. It even pretends to the name of virtue. But it casts down all the sacred barriers of religion. It laughs to scorn that suspicious vigilance, that trembling sensibility, that is the very characteristic of virtue. It represents those faults of which a man may be guilty without malignity, as innocent. And it endeavors to appropriate to itself all comprehensiveness of view, all true fortitude, and all liberal generosity.

Believe me, my friend, this is the enemy from which you have most to fear. It is not barefaced degeneracy that can seduce you. She must be introduced under a specious name, she must disguise herself like something that nature taught us to approve, and she must steal away the heart at unawares.