In perusing the following pages, it will I hope be believed, that they were not originally written with any view to publication: circumstances have since occurred, which induce me to alter my first intention, and to submit them to a more enlarged circle, than that of a few intimate friends, to whose eye alone I had once thought of presenting them. In committing my First Impressions to so fearful an ordeal as the opinion of the Public, I feel oppressed by a sense of their various imperfections, a