Clarissa Harlowe, Samuel Richardson [black authors fiction .txt] 📗

tell thee, Jack, if we had her among us, should not be so long deciding as her friend’s. What a gantelope would she run, when I had done with her, among a dozen of her own pitiless sex, whom my charmer shall never see!⁠—But more of this anon.

I find by this letter, that my saucy captive has been drawing the characters of every varlet of ye. Nor am I spared in it more than you. “The man’s a fool, to be sure, my dear.” Let me perish, if they either of them find me one!⁠—“A silly fellow, at least.” Cursed contemptible!⁠—“I see not but they are a set of infernals!” There’s one for thee, Lovelace! and yet she would have her friend marry a Beelzebub.⁠—And what have any of us done, (within the knowledge of Miss Harlowe), that she should give such an account of us, as should excuse so much abuse from Miss Howe!⁠—But the occasion that shall warrant this abuse is to come!

She blames her, for “not admitting Miss Partington to her bed⁠—watchful, as you are, what could have happened?⁠—If violence were intended, he would not stay for the night.” I am ashamed to have this hinted to me by this virago. Sally writes upon this hint⁠—“See, Sir, what is expected from you. An hundred, and an hundred times have we told you of this.”⁠—And so they have. But to be sure, the advice from them was not half the efficacy as it will be from Miss Howe.⁠—“You might have sat up after her, or not gone to bed,” proceeds she.

But can there be such apprehensions between them, yet the one advise her to stay, and the other resolve to wait my imperial motion for marriage? I am glad I know that.

She approves of my proposal of Mrs. Fretchville’s house. She puts her upon expecting settlements; upon naming a day: and concludes with insisting upon her writing, notwithstanding her mother’s prohibitions; or bids her “take the consequence.” Undutiful wretches! How I long to vindicate against them both the insulted parental character!

Thou wilt say to thyself, by this time, And can this proud and insolent girl be the same Miss Howe, who sighed for an honest Sir George Colmar; and who, but for this her beloved friend, would have followed him in all his broken fortunes, when he was obliged to quit the kingdom?

Yes, she is the very same. And I always found in others, as well as in myself, that a first passion thoroughly subdued, made the conqueror of it a rover; the conqueress a tyrant.

Well, but now comes mincing in a letter, from one who has “the honour of dear Miss Howe’s commands”150 to acquaint Miss Harlowe, that Miss Howe is “excessively concerned for the concern she has given her.”

“I have great temptations, on this occasion,” says the prim Gothamite, “to express my own resentments upon your present state.”

“My own resentments!”⁠—And why did he not fall into this temptation?⁠—Why, truly, because he knew not what that state was which gave him so tempting a subject⁠—only by a conjecture, and so forth.

He then dances in his style, as he does in his gait! To be sure, to be sure, he must have made the grand tour, and come home by way of Tipperary.

“And being moreover forbid,” says the prancer, “to enter into the cruel subject.”⁠—This prohibition was a mercy to thee, friend Hickman!⁠—But why cruel subject, if thou knowest not what it is, but conjecturest only from the disturbance it gives to a girl, that is her mother’s disturbance, will be thy disturbance, and the disturbance, in turn, of everybody with whom she is intimately acquainted, unless I have the humbling of her?

In another letter,151 the little fury professes, “that she will write, and that no man shall write for her,” as if some medium of that kind had been proposed. She approves of her fair friend’s intention “to leave me, if she can be received by her relations. I am a wretch, a foolish wretch. She hates me for my teasing ways. She has just made an acquaintance with one who knows a vast deal of my private history.” A curse upon her, and upon her historiographer!⁠—“The man is really a villain, an execrable one.” Devil take her!⁠—“Had I a dozen lives, I might have forfeited them all twenty crimes ago.” An odd way of reckoning, Jack!

Miss Betterton, Miss Lockyer, are named⁠—the man, (she irreverently repeats) she again calls a villain. Let me perish, I repeat, if I am called a villain for nothing!⁠—She “will have her uncle,” as Miss Harlowe requests, “sounded about receiving her. Dorcas is to be attached to her interest: my letters are to be come at by surprise or trick”⁠—

What thinkest thou of this, Jack?

Miss Howe is alarmed at my attempt to come at a letter of hers.

“Were I to come at the knowledge of her freedoms with my character,” she says, “she should be afraid to stir out without a guard.” I would advise the vixen to get her guard ready.

“I am at the head of a gang of wretches,” (thee, Jack, and thy brother varlets, she owns she means), “who join together to betray innocent creatures, and to support one another in their villanies.”⁠—What sayest thou to this, Belford?

“She wonders not at her melancholy reflections for meeting me, for being forced upon me, and tricked by me.”⁠—I hope, Jack, thou’lt have done preaching after this!

But she comforts her, “that she will be both a warning and an example to all her sex.” I hope the sex will thank me for this!

The nymphs had not time, they say, to transcribe all that was worthy of my resentment in this letter: so I must find an opportunity to come at it myself. Noble rant, they say, it contains⁠—But I am a seducer, and a hundred vile fellows, in it.⁠—“And the devil, it seems, took possession of my heart, and of the hearts of all her friends, in