_Frank Henley to Oliver Trenchard_
_London, Grosvenor-Street_
Oh, Oliver, how fair is the prospect before me! How fruitful of
felicity, how abundant in bliss! Yes, my friend, jointly will we
labour, your most worthy father, you, I, Anna, her friend, and all the
converts we can make to truth, to promote the great end we seek! We
will form a little band which will daily increase, will swell to a
multitude, ay till it embrace the whole human species!
Surely, Oliver, to be furnished with so many of the means of
promulgating universal happiness is no small blessing. My feelings are
all rapture! And yet if I know my heart, it is not because I have
gained a selfish solitary good; but because I live in an age when light
begins to appear even in regions that have hitherto been thick
darkness; and that I myself am so highly fortunate as to be able to
contribute to the great the universal cause; the progress of truth, the
extirpation of error, and the general perfection of mind! I and those
dear friends I have named; who are indeed dear because of their ardent
and uniform love of virtue!
Neither, Oliver, are all our hopes of Clifton lost. Anna thinks, and so
do I, that he has heard too much ever to forget it all: or rather that
he has a mind so penetrating, and so eternally busy, that, having been
once led to enquire, it is scarcely in the power of accident wholly to
impede the progress of enquiry. And should accident be favourable, that
progress would indeed be rapid! By his intercourse with Anna his mind
is become impregnated with the seeds of truth; and surely the soil is
too rich for these seeds not to spring, bud, and bear a plenteous
harvest. Ay, Oliver, fear not. It is not the beauty of the picture that
seduces, but the laws of necessity, which declare the result for which
we hope to be inevitable.
My present state of happiness meets some slight check from incidental
circumstances, not in my power to guide. My father and Sir Arthur are
doing what I believe to be a right thing, but from wrong motives. The
prodigal Edward, from a very different avarice of enjoyment, is eager
to dock the entail. The sum he is to receive will soon be squandered,
and he will then be as eager to imagine himself treated with injustice;
and will conceive himself left half to perish with want, if his
accustomed dissipation be not supplied. But that it must not be. If we
can teach him better we will; if not he must be left to repine and
accuse, and we must patiently suffer the error which we cannot cure.
Lord Fitz-Allen indulges himself in thinking as much ill of me as he
can, and in speaking all he thinks. But this is indeed a trifle. I know
that the mistakes of his mind, situated as he is, are incurable; and to
grieve or feel pain for what cannot be avoided is neither the act of
wisdom nor of virtue.