I am much obliged to your friendship, for the advice you have given
me with regard to my future conduct, and shall always pay the most
sincere deference to it. Both prudence and inclination will engage
me to get rid of the farm as soon as such a complicated piece of
business can be transacted. With respect to my expences they shall
always be proportioned to my income, and I am already preparing to
discharge a cook, a groom, and other unnecessary Servants. There is
one part of your letter which has given me, Dear Madam, very great
uneasiness. You say that you have heard from undoubted authority
that my own imprudences had so much embarrassed me, as to oblige me
to make a concession which otherwise I might not have done. Were I
conscious of these imprudencies, I should fairly acknowledge them,
and endeavour by future behaviour to make some amends for past
follies. But an innocent person has a right to speak a very different
language. I know my own innocence, and without any vain protestations
of it, I will at once come to such facts as must either establish
it, or else expose me not only as a prodigal, but as a man devoid of
honour and veracity. I therefore solemnly affirm the truth of the
following facts.
1. When I returned from Switzerland about twelve years and a half
ago, my father told me his affairs were a good deal embarrassed, and
desired that I would joyn in cutting off the entail and in raising
£10,000. I was then a raw lad of one and twenty, unacquainted with
law or business, and desirous of obliging my father. He then gave me
three hundred a year, a moderate allowance to which his eldest son
would have had a natural claim, had no such transaction intervened.
2. Upon and within that allowance, I have constantly lived, except
during two years and a half that I was abroad the second time.
Whilst I was abroad I spent about seven hundred a year, a sum which,
with the unavoidable expences of travelling, barely supports the
appearance of an English gentleman.
3. I have never on any occasion received from my father any pecuniary
inducements to consent to any step whatsoever, except once, four
hundred pounds, near £100 of which were arrears of my allowances, and
about the same sum I returned to my father when he wanted it very
much.
4. I have never lost at play a hundred pounds at any one time;
perhaps not in the course of my life. Play I neither love nor
understand.