MISS HOWE TO MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE.

Thursday Morning, March 2.

INDEED you would not be in love with him for the world! Your servant, my dear. Nor would

I have you. For I think, with all the advantages of person, fortune, and family, he is not by any means worthy of you. And this opinion I give as well from the reasons you mention (which I cannot but confirm) as from what I have heard of him but a few hours ago from Mrs. Fortescue, a favourite of Lady Betty Lawrence, who knows him well. ·

A hundred wild stories she tells of him, from childhood to manhood: he was always as mischievous as a monkey. But I shall pass over his puerile rogueries.

sun.

Mrs. Fortescue owns, what everybody knows, "that he is notoriously, nay, avowedly, a man of pleasure; yet says, that in anything he sets his heart upon or undertakes, he is the most industrious and persevering mortal under the He rests it seems not above six hours in the twenty-four-any more than you. He delights in writing. Whether at Lord M.'s, or at Lady Betty's, or Lady Sarah's, he has always a pen in his fingers when he retires. One of his companions (confirming his love of writing) has told her, that his thoughts flow rapidly to his pen."

Whatever his other vices are, all the world, as well as Mrs. Fortescue, says, "he is a sober man. And among all his bad qualities, gaming, that great waster of time as well as fortune, is not his vice:" so that he must have his head as cool, and his reason as clear, as the prime of youth and his natural gaiety will permit; and by his early morning hours, a great portion of time upon his hands, to employ in writing, or worse.

Mrs. Fortescue says, "he has one gentleman who is more his intimate and correspondent than any of the

rest." You remember what his dismissed bailiff said of him and of his associates. I don't find but that man's character of him was in general pretty just. Mrs. Fortescue confirms this part of it, "that all his relations are afraid of him; and that his pride sets him above owing obligations to them. She believes he is clear of the world; and that he will continue so:" no doubt from the same motive that makes him avoid being obliged to his relations.

A person willing to think favourably of him would hope, that a brave, a learned, and a diligent man, cannot be naturally a bad man. But if he be better than his enemies say he is (and if worse, he is bad indeed) he is guilty of an inexcusable fault in being so careless as he is of his reputation.

Upon the whole, and upon all that I could gather from Mrs. Fortescue, Mr. Lovelace is a very faulty man. You and I have thought him too gay, too inconsiderate, too rash, too little an hypocrite, to be deep. But were he deep, and ever so deep, you would soon penetrate him, if they would leave you to yourself. His vanity would be your clue. Never man had more: yet, as Mrs. Fortescue observed, "never did man carry it off so happily." There is a strange mixture in it of humorous vivacity :since but for one half of what he says of himself, when he is in the vein, any other man would be insufferable.

"Talk of the devil," is an old saying. The lively wretch has made me a visit, and is but just gone away. He is all impatience and resentment at the treatment you meet with; and full of apprehensions too, that they will carry their point with you.

I told him my opinion, that you will never be brought to think of such a man as Solmes; but that it will probably end in a composition, never to have either.

No man, he said, whose fortunes and alliances are so

considerable, ever had so little favour from a woman for whose sake he had borne so much.

But, Lord help the shallow souls of the Harlowes! Would I believe it? they were for turning plotters upon him. They had best take care he did not pay them in their own coin. Their hearts were better turned for such works, than their heads.

MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE TO MISS HOWE.

Wednesday, March 1.

NOW take up my pen, to lay before you the inducements and motives which my friends have to espouse so earnestly the address of this Mr. Solmes.

I gave you an account of my brother's and sister's antipathy to Mr. Lovelace; and I told you, that after a very cold, yet not a directly affrontive behaviour to him, they all of a sudden became more violent, and proceeded to personal insults; which brought on at last the unhappy rencounter between my brother and him.

Now you must know, that this sudden vehemence on my brother's and sister's parts, was owing to stronger reasons than to the college-begun antipathy on his side, or to slighted love on hers; to wit, to an apprehension that my uncles intended to follow my grandfather's example in my favour; at least in a higher degree than they wish they should. An apprehension founded it seems on a conversation between my two uncles and my brother and sister; which my aunt communicated to me in confidence.

I have more than once mentioned to you the darling view some of us have long had of raising a family, as it is called.

My brother, as the only son, thought the two girls might be very well provided for by ten or fifteen thousand

pounds apiece and that all the real estates in the family, to wit, my grandfather's, father's, and two uncles, and the remainder of their respective personal estates, together with what he had an expectation of from his godmother, would make such a noble fortune, and give him such an interest, as might entitle him to hope for a peerage. Nothing less would satisfy his ambition.

With this view he gave himself airs very early; "that his grandfather and uncles were his stewards: that no man ever had better: that daughters were but incumbrances and drawbacks upon a family:" and this low and familiar expression was often in his mouth, and uttered always with the self-complaisance which an imagined happy thought can be supposed to give the speaker; to wit, “that a man who has sons brings up chickens for his own table," (though once I made his comparison stagger with him, by asking him, if the sons, to make it hold, were to have their necks wrung off?) "whereas daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other men."

When my grandfather's will (of the purport of which in my particular favour, until it was opened, I was as ignorant as they) had lopped off one branch of my brother's expectation, he was extremely dissatisfied with me. Nobody indeed was pleased: for although every one loved me, yet being the youngest child, father, uncles, brother, sister, all thought themselves postponed, as to matter of right and power: and my father himself could not bear that I should be made sole, as I may call it, and independent; for such the will, as to that estate and the powers it gave (unaccountably as they all said), made me.

To obviate therefore every one's jealousy, I gave up to my father's management, as you know, not only the estate, but the money bequeathed me (which was a moiety of what my grandfather had by him at his death; the other moiety being bequeathed to my sister); contenting myself to take as from his bounty what he was pleased to

allow me, without desiring the least addition to my annual stipend.

My brother's acquisition then took place. This made us all very happy; and he went down to take possession of it and his absence (on so good an account too) made us still happier. Then followed Lord M.'s proposal for my sister and this was an additional felicity for the time. I have told you how exceedingly good-humoured it made my sister. You know how that went off: you know what came on in its place.

My brother then returned; and we were all wrong again and Bella, as I observed in my letters above mentioned, had an opportunity to give herself the credit of having refused Mr. Lovelace, on the score of his reputed faulty morals. This united my brother and sister in one cause. They set themselves on all occasions to depreciate Mr. Lovelace, and his family too (a family which deserves nothing but respect): and this gave rise to the conversation I am leading to between my uncles and them: of which I now come to give the particulars; after I have observed, that it happened before the rencounter, and soon after the inquiry made into Mr. Lovelace's affairs had come out better than my brother and sister hoped it would.

They were bitterly inveighing against him, in their usual way, strengthening their invectives with some new stories in his disfavour; when my uncle Antony, having given them a patient hearing, declared, “That he thought the gentleman behaved like a gentleman; his niece Clary with prudence; and that a more honourable alliance for the family, as he had often told them, could not be wished for since Mr. Lovelace had a very good paternal estate; and that, by the evidence of an enemy, all clear.

"That, besides his paternal estate, he was the immediate heir to very splendid fortunes: that, when he was in treaty for his niece Arabella, Lord M. told him (my uncle) what