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 control, 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
Letter 117
Mr. Lovelace, to John Belford, Esq.
Friday,
Thou hast often reproached me, Jack, with my vanity, without distinguishing the humorous 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 shortsighted 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 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 pass 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.
Some favourable incidents, at the time, tumbled in from my agent in her family; at least such as I was determined to make favourable: and therefore I desired admittance; and this before she could resolve anything against me; that is to say, while her admiration of my intrepidity kept resolution in suspense.
Accordingly, I prepared myself to be all gentleness, all obligingness, all serenity; and as I have now and then, and always had, more or less, good motions pop up in my mind, I encouraged and collected everything of this sort that I had ever had from novicehood to maturity, (not long in recollecting, Jack), in order to bring the dear creature into good humour with me:85 And who knows, thought I, if I can hold it, and proceed, but I may be able to lay a foundation fit to build my grand scheme upon!—love, thought I, is not naturally a doubter: fear is, I will try to banish the latter: nothing then but love will remain. Credulity is the God of Love’s prime minister, and they never are asunder.
[He then acquaints his friend with what passed between him and the Lady, in relation to his advices from Harlowe-place, and to his proposal about lodgings, pretty much to the same purpose as in her preceding Letter.
When he comes to mention his proposal of the Windsor lodgings, thus he expresses himself:]
Now, Belford, can it enter into thy leaden head, what I meant by this proposal!—I know it cannot. And so I’ll tell thee.
To leave her for a day or two, with a view
to serve her by my absence, would, as I thought, look like a confiding in her favour. I could not think of leaving her, thou knowest, while I had reason to believe her friends would pursue us; and I began to apprehend that she would suspect that I made a pretence of that intentional pursuit to keep about her and with her. But now that they had declared against it, and that they would not receive her if she went back, (a declaration she had better hear first from me, than from Miss Howe, or
