Chapter ii.

Religious cautions against showing too much favour to bastards; and a

great discovery made by Mrs Deborah Wilkins.

Eight months after the celebration of the nuptials between Captain

Blifil and Miss Bridget Allworthy, a young lady of great beauty,

merit, and fortune, was Miss Bridget, by reason of a fright, delivered

of a fine boy. The child was indeed to all appearances perfect; but

the midwife discovered it was born a month before its full time.

Though the birth of an heir by his beloved sister was a circumstance

of great joy to Mr Allworthy, yet it did not alienate his affections

from the little foundling, to whom he had been godfather, had given

his own name of Thomas, and whom he had hitherto seldom failed of

visiting, at least once a day, in his nursery.

He told his sister, if she pleased, the new-born infant should be bred

up together with little Tommy; to which she consented, though with

some little reluctance: for she had truly a great complacence for her

brother; and hence she had always behaved towards the foundling with

rather more kindness than ladies of rigid virtue can sometimes bring

themselves to show to these children, who, however innocent, may be

truly called the living monuments of incontinence.

The captain could not so easily bring himself to bear what he

condemned as a fault in Mr Allworthy. He gave him frequent hints, that

to adopt the fruits of sin, was to give countenance to it. He quoted

several texts (for he was well read in Scripture), such as, _He visits

the sins of the fathers upon the children; and the fathers have eaten

sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge_,&c. Whence he

argued the legality of punishing the crime of the parent on the

bastard. He said, “Though the law did not positively allow the

destroying such base-born children, yet it held them to be the

children of nobody; that the Church considered them as the children of

nobody; and that at the best, they ought to be brought up to the

lowest and vilest offices of the commonwealth.”

Mr Allworthy answered to all this, and much more, which the captain

had urged on this subject, “That, however guilty the parents might be,

the children were certainly innocent: that as to the texts he had

quoted, the former of them was a particular denunciation against the

Jews, for the sin of idolatry, of relinquishing and hating their

heavenly King; and the latter was parabolically spoken, and rather

intended to denote the certain and necessary consequences of sin, than

any express judgment against it. But to represent the Almighty as

avenging the sins of the guilty on the innocent, was indecent, if not

blasphemous, as it was to represent him acting against the first

principles of natural justice, and against the original notions of

right and wrong, which he himself had implanted in our minds; by which

we were to judge not only in all matters which were not revealed, but

even of the truth of revelation itself. He said he knew many held the

same principles with the captain on this head; but he was himself

firmly convinced to the contrary, and would provide in the same manner

for this poor infant, as if a legitimate child had had fortune to have

been found in the same place.”

While the captain was taking all opportunities to press these and such

like arguments, to remove the little foundling from Mr Allworthy's, of

whose fondness for him he began to be jealous, Mrs Deborah had made a

discovery, which, in its event, threatened at least to prove more

fatal to poor Tommy than all the reasonings of the captain.

Whether the insatiable curiosity of this good woman had carried her on

to that business, or whether she did it to confirm herself in the good

graces of Mrs Blifil, who, notwithstanding her outward behaviour to

the foundling, frequently abused the infant in private, and her

brother too, for his fondness to it, I will not determine; but she had

now, as she conceived, fully detected the father of the foundling.

Now, as this was a discovery of great consequence, it may be necessary

to trace it from the fountain-head. We shall therefore very minutely

lay open those previous matters by which it was produced; and for that

purpose we shall be obliged to reveal all the secrets of a little

family with which my reader is at present entirely unacquainted; and

of which the oeconomy was so rare and extraordinary, that I fear it

will shock the utmost credulity of many married persons.