MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE, TO MISS HOWE
SATURDAY, SEPT. 2.
I write, my beloved Miss Howe, though very ill still: but I could not by
the return of your messenger; for I was then unable to hold a pen.
Your mother's illness (as mentioned in the first part of your letter,)
gave me great distress for you, till I read farther. You bewailed it as
became a daughter so sensible. May you be blessed in each other for
many, very many years to come! I doubt not, that even this sudden and
grievous indisposition, by the frame it has put you in, and the
apprehension it has given you of losing so dear a mother, will contribute
to the happiness I wish you: for, alas! my dear, we seldom know how to
value the blessings we enjoy, till we are in danger of losing them, or
have actually lost them: and then, what would we give to have them
restored to us!
What, I wonder, has again happened between you and Mr. Hickman? Although
I know not, I dare say it is owing to some petty petulance, to some
half-ungenerous advantage taken of his obligingness and assiduity. Will
you never, my dear, give the weight you and all our sex ought to give to
the qualities of sobriety and regularity of life and manners in that sex?
Must bold creatures, and forward spirits, for ever, and by the best and
wisest of us, as well as by the indiscreetest, be the most kindly
treated?
My dear friends know not that I have actually suffered within less than
an inch of my life.
Poor Mr. Brand! he meant well, I believe. I am afraid all will turn
heavily upon him, when he probably imagined that he was taking the best
method to oblige. But were he not to have been so light of belief, and
so weakly officious; and had given a more favourable, and, it would be
strange if I could not say, a juster report; things would have been,
nevertheless, exactly as they are.
I must lay down my pen. I am very ill. I believe I shall be better
by-and-by. The bad writing would betray me, although I had a mind to
keep from you what the event must soon--
***
Now I resume my trembling pen. Excuse the unsteady writing. It will
be so--
I have wanted no money: so don't be angry about such a trifle as money.
Yet I am glad of what you inclined me to hope, that my friends will give
up the produce of my grandfather's estate since it has been in their
hands: because, knowing it to be my right, and that they could not want
it, I had already disposed of a good part of it; and could only hope they
would be willing to give it up at my last request. And now how rich
shall I think myself in this my last stage!--And yet I did not want
before--indeed I did not--for who, that has many superfluities, can be
said to want!
Do not, my dear friend, be concerned that I call it my last stage; For
what is even the long life which in high health we wish for? What, but,
as we go along, a life of apprehension, sometimes for our friends,
oftener for ourselves? And at last, when arrived at the old age we
covet, one heavy loss or deprivation having succeeded another, we see
ourselves stript, as I may say, of every one we loved; and find ourselves
exposed, as uncompanionable poor creatures, to the slights, to the
contempts, of jostling youth, who want to push us off the stage, in hopes
to possess what we have:--and, superadded to all, our own infirmities
every day increasing: of themselves enough to make the life we wished for
the greatest disease of all! Don't you remember the lines of Howard,
which once you read to me in my ivy-bower?*
* These are the lines the lady refers to:
From death we rose to life: 'tis but the same,
Through life to pass again from whence we came.
With shame we see our PASSIONS can prevail,
Where reason, certainty, and virtue fail.
HONOUR, that empty name, can death despise; |
SCORN'D LOVE to death, as to a refuge, flies; |
And SORROW waits for death with longing eyes. |
HOPE triumphs o'er the thoughts of death; and FATE
Cheats fools, and flatters the unfortunate.
We fear to lose, what a small time must waste,
Till life itself grows the disease at last.
Begging for life, we beg for more decay,
And to be long a dying only pray.
In the disposition of what belongs to me, I have endeavoured to do every
thing in the justest and best manner I could think of; putting myself in
my relations' places, and, in the greater points, ordering my matters as
if no misunderstanding had happened.
I hope they will not think much of some bequests where wanted, and where
due from my gratitude: but if they should, what is done, is done; and I
cannot now help it. Yet I must repeat, that I hope, I hope, I have
pleased every one of them. For I would not, on any account, have it
thought that, in my last disposition, any thing undaughterly, unsisterly,
or unlike a kinswoman, should have had place in a mind that is a truly
free (as I will presume to say) from all resentment, that it now
overflows with gratitude and blessings for the good I have received,
although it be not all that my heart wished to receive. Were it even an
hardship that I was not favoured with more, what is it but an hardship
of half a year, against the most indulgent goodness of eighteen years and
an half, that ever was shown to a daughter?
My cousin, you tell me, thinks I was off my guard, and that I was taken
at some advantage. Indeed, my dear, I was not. Indeed I gave no room
for advantage to be taken of me. I hope, one day, that will be seen, if
I have the justice done me which Mr. Belford assures me of.
I should hope that my cousin has not taken the liberties which you (by an
observation not, in general, unjust) seem to charge him with. For it is
sad to think, that the generality of that sex should make so light of
crimes, which they justly hold so unpardonable in their own most intimate
relations of our's--yet cannot commit them without doing such injuries to
other families as they think themselves obliged to resent unto death,
when offered to their own.
But we women are too often to blame on this head; since the most virtuous
among us seldom make virtue the test of their approbation of the other
sex; insomuch that a man may glory in his wickedness of this sort without
being rejected on that account, even to the faces of women of
unquestionable virtue. Hence it is, that a libertine seldom thinks
himself concerned so much as to save appearances: And what is it not that
our sex suffers in their opinion on this very score? And what have I,
more than many others, to answer for on this account in the world's eye?
May my story be a warning to all, how they prefer a libertine to a man of
true honour; and how they permit themselves to be misled (where they mean
the best) by the specious, yet foolish hope of subduing riveted habits,
and, as I may say, of altering natures!--The more foolish, as constant
experience might convince us, that there is hardly one in ten, of even
tolerably happy marriages, in which the wife keeps the hold in the
husband's affections, which she had in the lover's. What influence then
can she hope to have over the morals of an avowed libertine, who marries
perhaps for conveniency, who despises the tie, and whom, it is too
probable, nothing but old age, or sickness, or disease, (the consequence
of ruinous riot,) can reclaim?