Volume III Part 20 (1/2)

I will not throw cold water, Mr. Lovelace, said I, on a rising flame: but look to it! for I shall endeavour to keep you up to this spirit. I shall measure your value of me by this test: and I would have you bear those charming lines of Mr. Rowe for ever in your mind; you, who have, by your own confession, so much to repent of; and as the scar, indeed, you shewed me, will, in one instance, remind you to your dying day.

The lines, my dear, are from the poet's Ulysses; you have heard me often admire them; and I repeated them to him:

Habitual evils change not on a sudden: But many days must pa.s.s, and many sorrows; Conscious remorse and anguish must be felt, To curb desire, to break the stubborn will, And work a second nature in the soul, Ere Virtue can resume the place she lost: 'Tis else dissimulation--

He had often read these lines, he said; but never tasted them before.--By his soul, (the unmortified creature swore,) and as he hoped to be saved, he was now in earnest in his good resolutions. He had said, before I repeated those lines from Rowe, that habitual evils could not be changed on a sudden: but he hoped he should not be thought a dissembler, if he were not enabled to hold his good purposes; since ingrat.i.tude and dissimulation were vices that of all others he abhorred.

May you ever abhor them, said I. They are the most odious of all vices.

I hope, my dear Miss Howe, I shall not have occasion, in my future letters, to contradict these promising appearances. Should I have nothing on his side to combat with, I shall be very far from being happy, from the sense of my fault, and the indignation of all my relations. So shall not fail of condign punishment for it, from my inward remorse on account of my forfeited character. But the least ray of hope could not dart in upon me, without my being willing to lay hold of the very first opportunity to communicate it to you, who take so generous a share in all my concerns.

Nevertheless, you may depend upon it, my dear, that these agreeable a.s.surances, and hopes of his begun reformation, shall not make me forget my caution. Not that I think, at worst, any more than you, that he dare to harbour a thought injurious to my honour: but he is very various, and there is an apparent, and even an acknowledged unfixedness in his temper, which at times gives me uneasiness. I am resolved therefore to keep him at a distance from my person and my thoughts, as much as I can: for whether all men are or are not encroachers, I am sure Mr. Lovelace is one.

Hence it is that I have always cast about, and will continue to cast about, what ends he may have in view from this proposal, or from that report. In a word, though hopeful of the best, I will always be fearful of the worst, in every thing that admits of doubt. For it is better, in such a situation as mine, to apprehend without cause, than to subject myself to surprise for want of forethought.

Mr. Lovelace is gone to Windsor, having left two servants to attend me.

He purposes to be back to-morrow.

I have written to my aunt Hervey, to supplicate her interest in my behalf, for my clothes, books, and money; signifying to her, 'That, if I may be restored to the favour of my family, and allowed a negative only, as to any man who may be proposed to me, and be used like a daughter, a niece, and a sister, I will stand by my offer to live single, and submit, as I ought, to a negative from my father.' Intimating, nevertheless, 'That it were perhaps better, after the usage I have received from my brother and sister, that I may be allowed to be distant from them, as well for their sakes as for my own,' (meaning, as I suppose it will be taken, at my Dairy-house)--offering, 'to take my father's directions as to the manner I shall live in, the servants I shall have, and in every thing that shall shew the dutiful subordination to which I am willing to conform.'

My aunt will know by my letter to my sister how to direct to me, if she be permitted to favour me with a line.

I am equally earnest with her in this letter, as I was with my sister in that I wrote to her, to obtain for me a speedy reconciliation, that I not be further precipitated; intimating, 'That, by a timely lenity, all may pa.s.s for a misunderstanding only, which, otherwise, will be thought equally disgraceful to them, and to me; appealing to her for the necessity I was under to do what I did.'--

Had I owned that I was overreached, and forced away against my intention, might they not, as a proof of the truth of my a.s.sertion, have insisted upon my immediate return to them? And, if I did not return, would they not have reason to suppose, that I had now altered my mind (if such were my mind) or had not the power to return?--Then were I to have gone back, must it not have been upon their own terms? No conditioning with a father! is a maxim with my father, and with my uncles. If I would have gone, Mr. Lovelace would have opposed it. So I must have been under his controul, or have run away from him, as it is supposed I did to him, from Harlowe-place. In what a giddy light would this have made me appear!--Had he constrained me, could I have appealed to my friends for their protection, without risking the very consequences, to prevent which (setting up myself presumptuously, as a middle person between flaming spirits,) I have run into such terrible inconveniencies.

But, after all, must it not give me great anguish of mind, to be forced to sanctify, as I may say, by my seeming after-approbation, a measure I was so artfully tricked into, and which I was so much resolved not to take?

How one evil brings on another, is sorrowfully witnessed to by

Your ever-obliged and affectionate, CL. HARLOWE.

LETTER XXV

MR. LOVELACE, TO JOHN BELFORD, ESQ. FRIDAY, APR. 14.

Thou hast often reproached me, Jack, with my vanity, without distinguis.h.i.+ng the humourous turn that accompanies it; and for which, at the same time that thou robbest me of the merit of it thou admirest me highly. Envy gives thee the indistinction: Nature inspires the admiration: unknown to thyself it inspires it. But thou art too clumsy and too short-sighted a mortal, to know how to account even for the impulses by which thou thyself art moved.

Well, but this acquits thee not of my charge of vanity, Lovelace, methinks thou sayest.

And true thou sayest: for I have indeed a confounded parcel of it. But, if men of parts may not be allowed to be in vain, who should! and yet, upon second thoughts, men of parts have the least occasion of any to be vain; since the world (so few of them are there in it) are ready to find them out, and extol them. If a fool can be made sensible that there is a man who has more understanding than himself, he is ready enough to conclude, that such a man must be a very extraordinary creature.

And what, at this rate, is the general conclusion to be drawn from the premises?--Is it not, That no man ought to be vain? But what if a man can't help it!--This, perhaps, may be my case. But there is nothing upon which I value myself so much as upon my inventions. And for the soul of me, I cannot help letting it be seen, that I do. Yet this vanity may be a mean, perhaps, to overthrow me with this sagacious lady.

She is very apprehensive of me I see. I have studied before her and Miss Howe, as often as I have been with them, to pa.s.s for a giddy thoughtless creature. What a folly then to be so expatiatingly sincere, in my answer to her home put, upon the noises within the garden?--But such success having attended that contrivance [success, Jack, has blown many a man up!] my cursed vanity got uppermost, and kept down my caution. The menace to have secreted Solmes, and that other, that I had thoughts to run away with her foolish brother, and of my project to revenge her upon the two servants, so much terrified the dear creature, that I was forced to sit down to muse after means to put myself right in her opinion.