Wounded as I think all these are by the injuries you have received, you will believe that the knowledge of your distresses must have afflicted, beyond what I am able to express,
Letter 428
Miss Cl. Harlowe, to the Rev. Dr. Lewen
Sat.
Reverend and Dear Sir,
I thought, till I received your affectionate and welcome letter, that I had neither father, uncle, brother left; nor hardly a friend among my former favourers of your sex. Yet, knowing you so well, and having no reason to upbraid myself with a faulty will, I was to blame, (even although I had doubted the continuance of your good opinion), to decline the trial whether I had forfeited it or not; and if I had, whether I could not honourably reinstate myself in it.
But, Sir, it was owing to different causes that I did not; partly to shame, to think how high, in my happier days, I stood in your esteem, and how much I must be sunk in it, since those so much nearer in relation to me gave me up; partly to deep distress, which makes the humbled heart diffident; and made mine afraid to claim the kindred mind in yours, which would have supplied to me in some measure all the dear and lost relations I have named.
Then, so loth, as I sometimes was, to be thought to want to make a party against those whom both duty and inclination bid me reverence: so long trailed on between hope and doubt: so little my own mistress at one time; so fearful of making or causing mischief at another; and not being encouraged to hope, by your kind notice, that my application to you would be acceptable:—apprehending that my relations had engaged your silence at least340—these—But why these unavailing retrospections now?—I was to be unhappy—in order to be happy; that is my hope!—Resigning therefore to that hope, I will, without any further preamble, write a few lines, (if writing to you, I can write but a few), in answer to the subject of your kind letter.
Permit me, then, to say, That I believe your arguments would have been unanswerable in almost every other case of this nature, but in that of the unhappy Clarissa Harlowe.
It is certain that creatures who cannot stand the shock of public shame, should be doubly careful how they expose themselves to the danger of incurring private guilt, which may possibly bring them to it. But as to myself, suppose there were no objections from the declining way I am in as to my health; and supposing I could have prevailed upon myself to appear against this man; were there not room to apprehend that the end so much wished for by my friends, (to wit, his condign punishment), would not have been obtained, when it came to be seen that I had consented to give him a clandestine meeting; and, in consequence of that, had been weakly tricked out of living under one roof with him for several weeks; which I did, (not only without complaint, but) without cause of complaint?
Little advantage in a court, (perhaps, bandied about, and jested profligately with), would some of those pleas in my favour have been, which out of court, and to a private and serious audience, would have carried the greatest weight against him—Such, particularly, as the infamous methods to which he had recourse—
It would, no doubt, have been a ready retort from every mouth, that I ought not to have thrown myself into the power of such a man, and that I ought to take for my pains what had befallen me.
But had the prosecution been carried on to effect, and had he even been sentenced to death, can it be supposed that his family would not have had interest enough to obtain his pardon, for a crime thought too lightly of, though one of the greatest that can be committed against a creature valuing her honour above her life?—While I had been censured as pursuing with sanguinary views a man who offered me early all the reparation in his power to make?
And had he been pardoned, would he not then have been at liberty to do as much mischief as ever?
I dare say, Sir, such is the assurance of the man upon whom my unhappy destiny threw me; and such his inveteracy to my family, (which would then have appeared to be justified by their known inveteracy to him, and by their earnest endeavours to take away his life); that he would not have been sorry to have had an opportunity to confront me, and my father, uncles, and brother, at the bar of a court of justice, on such an occasion. In which case, would not (on his acquittal, or pardon) resentments have been reciprocally heightened? And then would my brother, or my cousin Morden, have been more secure than now?
How do these conditions aggravate my fault! My motives, at first, were not indeed blamable: but I had forgotten the excellent caution, which yet I was not ignorant of,
That we ought not to do evil that good may come of it.In full conviction of the purity of my heart, and of the firmness of my principles, (Why may I not, thus called upon, say what I am conscious of, and yet without the imputation of faulty pride; since all is but a duty, and I should be utterly inexcusable, could I not justly say what I do?—In this full
