The Ivy Summerhouse (or Ivy Bower, as it was sometimes called in the family) was a place, that from a girl, this young lady delighted in. She used, in the summer months, frequently to sit and work, and read, and write, and draw, and (when permitted) to breakfast, and dine, and sometimes to sup, in it; especially when Miss Howe, who had an equal liking to it, was her visitor and guest.
She describes it, in another letter (which appears not) as “pointing to a pretty variegated landscape of wood, water, and hilly country; which had pleased her so much, that she had drawn it; the piece hanging up, in her parlous, among some of her other drawings.” ↩
They might, no doubt, make a dependence upon the reasons she gives: but their chief reliance was upon the vigilance of their Joseph Leman; little imagining what an implement he was of Mr. Lovelace. ↩
This, in another of her letters, (which neither is inserted), is thus described:—“A piece of ruins upon it, the remains of an old chapel, now standing in the midst of the coppice; here and there an overgrown oak, surrounded with ivy and mistletoe, starting up, to sanctify, as it were, the awful solemnness of the place: a spot, too, where a man having been found hanging some years ago, it was used to be thought of by us when children, and by the maidservants, with a degree of terror, (it being actually the habitation of owls, ravens, and other ominous birds), as haunted by ghosts, goblins, specters: the genuine result of the country loneliness and ignorance: notions which, early propagated, are apt to leave impressions even upon minds grown strong enough at the same time to despise the like credulous follies in others.” ↩
Well might he be so sure, when he had the art to play them off, by his corrupted agent, and to make them all join to promote his views unknown to themselves; as is shown in some of his preceding letters. ↩
See Numbers 30. Where it is declared, whose vows shall be binding, and whose not. The vows of a man, or of a widow, are there pronounced to be indispensable; because they are sole, and subject to no other domestic authority. But the vows of a single woman, or of a wife, if the father of the one, or the husband of the other, disallow of them as soon as they know them, are to be of no force.
A matter highly necessary to be known; by all young ladies especially, whose designing addressers too often endeavour to engage them by vows; and then plead conscience and honour to them to hold them down to the performance. It cannot be amiss to recite the very words.
Ver. 3 If a woman vow a vow unto the Lord, and bind herself by a bond, being in her father’s house in her youth
;
4. And her father hear her vow, and her bond wherewith she hath bound her soul, and her father shall hold his peace at her; then all her vows shall stand, and every bond wherewith she hath bound her soul shall stand
.
5. But if her father disallow her in the day that he heareth; not any of her vows or of her bonds wherewith she hath bound her soul shall stand: and the Lord shall forgive her, because her father disallowed her
.
The same in the case of a wife, as said above. See ver. 6, 7, 8, etc.—All is thus solemnly closed:
Ver. 16. These are the statutes which the Lord commanded Moses between a man and his wife, between the father and his daughter, being yet in her youth in her father’s house
. ↩
Ecclesiasticus 37:13, 14.
Ecclesiasticus is a book originally included within the King James Bible, but now regarded as part of the Apocrypha. —Editor ↩
It is easy for such of the readers as have been attentive to Mr. Lovelace’s manner of working, to suppose, from this hint of Miss Hervey’s, that he had instructed his double-faced agent to put his sweetheart Betty upon alarming Miss Hervey, in hopes she would alarm her beloved cousin, (as we see she does), in order to keep her steady to her appointment with him. ↩
See Letter 113. ↩
Clarissa has been censured as behaving to Mr. Lovelace, in their first conversation at St. Alban’s, and afterwards, with too much reserve, and even with haughtiness. Surely those, who have thought her to blame on this account, have not paid a due attention to the story. How early, as above, and in what immediately follows, does he remind her of the terms of distance which she had prescribed to him, before she was in his power, in hopes to leave the door open for a reconciliation with her friends, which her heart was set upon? And how artfully does he (unrequired) promise to observe the conditions in which she in her present circumstances and situation (in pursuance of Miss Howe’s advice) would gladly have dispensed with?—To say nothing of the resentment she was under a necessity to show, at the manner of his getting her away, in order to justify to him the sincerity of her refusal to go off with him. See, in her subsequent Letter to Miss Howe, Letter 101, her own sense upon the subject. ↩
