Clarissa Harlowe (Volume IX)

The following History is given in a series of letters written Principally in a double yet separate correspondence between two young ladies of virtue and honor bearing an inviolable friendship for each other and writing not merely for amusement but upon the most interesting subjects; in which every private family more or less may find itself concerned; and between two gentlemen of free lives; one of them glorying in his talents for stratagem and invention and communicating to the other in confidence all the secret purposes of an intriguing head and resolute heart.But here it will be proper to observe for the sake of such as may apprehend hurt to the morals of youth from the more freely-written letters that the gentlemen though professed libertines as to the female sex and making it one of their wicked maxims to keep no faith with any of the individuals of it who are thrown into their power are not however either infidels or scoffers; nor yet such as think themselves freed from the observance of those other moral duties which bind man to man.