_Iachimo._ Here are letters for you.
_Posthumus._ Their tenor good, I trust.
_Iachimo._ ’Tis very like.
_Cymbeline_ ii. 4.
They had set (it is years ago now) the Period of the Restoration as
subject for the Historical Essay Prize at Oxbridge. I had been advised
to read Courtenay’s _Life of Sir William Temple_. It would give me an
insight into the times, and a thorough knowledge of the Triple Alliance.
It was in my uncle’s library that I found the book—two octavo volumes of
memoirs bound in plain green cloth, with mouldy yellow backs. I remember
it well, and the circumstances surrounding it.
I threw open the windows, piled all the red cushions into one window
seat, placed a chair for my feet, and took up the volumes. I cast my
eyes over the contents of Vol. I.: a portrait of Temple—a handsome
fellow—engraved by one Dean, after Sir Peter; a genealogical table. Ugh!
And twenty chapters of negotiations to follow. My uncle was right, it was
undoubtedly a dull book.
The second volume looked more interesting; there was something in it
about Swift. Memory asserting herself, I remembered Temple to be Swift’s
first patron, and Stella, I fancy, was Lady Temple’s maid. Happy Stella!
At that moment a piece of paper fluttered out of the volume in my hand on
to the floor, driving the Dean and his affairs out of my head. I picked
it up. An old paper, brown at its edges and foldings, singed by time. On
it were some verses—a sonnet. It ran thus:—
“TO DOROTHY OSBORNE,
“Why has no laureate, in golden song,
Wreathed rhythmic honours for her name alone,
Who worships now anear a purer throne?
And chosen, from that lovely, loyal throng
Of wantons ambling devilward along
At beck of God’s Anointed, one to praise,
Of brightest wit, yet pure through works and days,
Constant in love, in every virtue strong.
Dorothy, gift of God, it was not meant,
That thy bright light should shine upon the few,
Within the straitened circle of thy life;
Failing to reach mankind and represent
His own ideal, manifest in you,
Of holy woman and the perfect wife.”
I was a sonneteer myself, and therefore critical. This effort (was it my
uncle’s?) did not seem to me of portentous genius. I hate your sonneteer
who has more than two rhymes in his octett. It proves him a coward at the
measure, one who is burdened by those shackles in which he should move as
skilfully and lightly as a clever dancer bound to the knees on stilts.
Those two subdominant rhymes were misplaced; so was the sudden stop in
the sixth line, the violent _cæsura_ in the sense, sending a cold shiver
through the cultured mind. I did not admire the sestett either in its
arrangement, but much liberty has always been allowed in the management
of the sestett. For an amateur sonnet, I had read, nay, I will be just, I
had written worse.
But whom does this sonnet describe? Dorothy Osborne, who is she? Lady
Temple, answers Courtenay, and says little more. But she has written her
own life, and painted her own character, as none else could have done it
for her, in letters written to her husband before marriage. When I had
read these, I pitied the unknown, and forbore to criticise his sonnet.
I, too, could have written sonnets, roundels, ballads by the score to
celebrate her praise. But I remembered Pope’s chill warning about those
who “rush in where angels fear to tread,” and, full of humility I did not
apply it to my friend the sonneteer, but—to myself.
These letters of Dorothy Osborne were, at one time, lying at Coddenham
Vicarage, Suffolk. Forty-two of them has Courtenay transferred to an
appendix, without arrangement or any form of editing, as he candidly
confesses, but not without misgivings as to how they will be received
by a people thirsting to read the details of the negotiations which
took place in connection with the Triple Alliance. Poor Courtenay! Did
he live to learn that the world had other things to do than pore over
dull excerpts from inhuman state papers? For the lighting of fires, for
the rag-bag, or, if of stout paper or parchment, for the due covering of
preserves and pickles, much of these Temple correspondences and treaties
would be eminently fitted, but for the making of books they are all but
useless; book-making of such material is not to be achieved by Courtenay,
nay, nor by the cunningest publisher’s devil in Grub Street. Here,
beneath poor blind Courtenay’s eye, were papers and negotiations, not
about a triple alliance between states, but concerning a dual alliance
between souls. Here, even for the dull historian, were chat, gossip,
the witty portrayal of neighbours, the customs, manners, thoughts, the
very life itself, of English human beings of that time, set out by the
living pen of Dorothy Osborne. Surely it was within his power at least to
edit carefully for us those letters? Alas, no! All that he can do is to
produce a book in two unreadable octavo volumes, and to set down in an
appendix, not without misgivings but forty-two of these charming letters.
But I will dare to put it to the touch to gain or lose it all. I cannot,
I know, make her glorious by _my_ pen, but I can let her own pen have
free play, and try to draw from her letters, and what other data there
are at hand, some living presentment of a beautiful woman, pure in
dissolute days, passing a quiet domestic existence among her own family;
a loyalist, leading, in Cromwell’s days, a home-life of which those who
draw their history from the pleasant pages of Sir Walter’s historical
novels can have little idea. To confirmed novel readers it will be,
I think, an awakening to learn that there was ever cessation of the
“clashing of rapiers” and “heavy tramp of cavalry” in the middle of the
seventeenth century.
Dorothy Osborne, born in 1627, was the daughter of Sir Peter Osborne,
Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer (an inherited office) and Governor of
Guernsey in the days of James I. and Charles his son. She was the only
daughter now (1650) unmarried, and had been named after her mother,
Dorothy, without further addition. Much more could be collected of this
sort from the lumber in Baronetages and Herald’s manuals; but to what
purpose? William Temple was born in 1628.
It was in 1648, when the King was imprisoned at Carisbrook, in Colonel
Hammond’s charge, that Dorothy first met her constant lover. They met
in the Isle of Wight. She and her brother were on their way to St.
Malo. Temple was starting on his travels. A little incident, almost a
Waverley incident, took place here, worth reciting, perhaps. The Osbornes
and Temple were loyalists. Young Osborne, more loyal than intelligent,
remained behind at an inn where they had halted, that he might write on a
window pane with a diamond “And Haman was hanged upon the gallows he had
prepared for Mordecai.” This attack on Colonel Hammond, and the audacity
of a cavalier daring to apply the Scriptures after the Puritanical
method, caused the whole party to be arrested by the Roundheads, and a
very pretty adventure was spoilt by the ready wit of our Dorothy taking
the offence upon herself, when, through the gallantry of the Roundhead
officer, the whole party was suffered to depart. “This incident,” says
Courtenay, on good authority, “was not lost upon Temple.” Indeed, I think
with Courtenay; but would add that much else besides was not lost upon
him. Travelling with her and her brother, staying with her at St. Malo,
is it to be wondered that Temple was attracted by the bright wit, clear
faith and honesty of Dorothy; or that the brilliant parts and seriousness
of Temple—a great contrast to many of the bibulous, rowdy cavaliers whom
she must have met with—made her find in him one worthy of her friendship
and her love? That Temple at this time openly declared his love I doubt.
Love grew between them unknown to either. Years afterwards Dorothy
writes:—
“For God’s sake, when we meet let us design one day to remember old
stories in, to ask one another by what degrees our friendship grew to
this height ’tis at. In earnest I am at a loss sometimes in thinking
on’t; and though I can never repent of the share you have in my heart, I
know not whether I gave it you willingly or not at first. No; to speak
ingenuously, I think you got an interest there a good while before I
thought you had any, and it grew so insensibly, and yet so fast, that
all the traverses it has met with since, have served rather to discover
it to me than at all to hinder it.”
The further circumstances necessary to the understanding of Dorothy’s
letters, are shortly, these: Dorothy lived at Chicksands Priory,
where her father was in ill-health, and there she received suitors at
her parent’s commands. The Osbornes, it seemed, disliked Temple, and
objected to him on the score of want of means; whilst Temple’s father
had planned for his son an advantageous match in another quarter. Alas!
for the frowardness of young couples! They held their course, and waited
successfully.
Hardly can we do better that you may picture Dorothy and her mode of life
clearly to yourself, than copy this important letter for you at length:
“You ask me how I pass my time here. I can give you a perfect account,
not only of what I do for the present, but of what I am likely to do this
seven years if I stay here so long. I rise in the morning reasonably
early, and before I am ready I go round the house till I am weary of
that, and then in the garden till it grows too hot for me. About ten
o’clock I think of making me ready; and when that’s done I go into my
father’s chamber; from thence to dinner, where my cousin Molle and I sit
in great state in a room and at a table that would hold a great many
more. After dinner we sit and talk till Mr. B. comes in question, and
then I am gone. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and
about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by
the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit
in the shade singing of ballads; I go to them, and compare their voices
and beauty to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a
vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as
those could be. I talk to them, and find _they want nothing to make them
the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so_.
Most commonly, while we are in the middle of our discourse, one looks
about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all
run as if they had wings at their heels. I, that am not so nimble, stay
behind, and when I see them driving home their cattle I think ’tis time
for me to retire too. When I have supped I go into the garden, and so to
the side of a small river that runs by it, where I sit down and wish you
with me (you had best say this is not kind, neither). In earnest, ’tis a
pleasant place, and would be more so to me if I had your company. I sit
there sometimes till I am lost with thinking; and were it not for some
cruel thought of the crossness of our fortune, that will not let me sleep
there, I should forget there were such a thing to be done as going to
bed.”
Truly a quiet country life, in a quiet country house; poor lonely Dorothy!
Chicksands Priory, Bedfordshire, is a low-built sacro-secular edifice,
well fitted for its former service Its priestly denizens were turned
out in Henry VIII’s monk-hunting reign (1538). To the joy or sorrow of
the neighbourhood: who knows now? Granted then to one, Richard Snow,
of whom the records are silent; by him sold, in Elizabeth’s reign, to
Sir John Osborne, Knt. (Dorothy’s brother was first baronet); thus it
becomes the ancestral home of our Dorothy. There is a crisp etching of
the house in Fisher’s Collections of Bedfordshire. The very exterior of
it is Catholic, unpuritanical, no methodism about the square windows set
here and there, at undecided intervals, wheresoever they may be wanted.
Six attic windows jut out from the low-tiled roof. At the corner of the
house a high pinnacled buttress rising the full height of the wall;
five buttresses flank the side wall, built so that they shade the lower
windows from the morning sun, in one place reaching to the sill of an
upper window. Perhaps Mrs. Dorothy’s window; how tempting to scale and
see. What a spot for the happier realisation of Romeo and Juliet, or of
Sigismonde and Guichard, if this were romance. In one end of the wall
are two Gothic windows, claustral remnants, lighting now, perhaps, the
dining-hall, where cousin Molle and Dorothy sat in state; or the saloon,
where the latter received her servants. There are old cloisters attached
to the house; at the other side of it may be. Yes! a sleepy country
house, the warm earth and her shrubs creeping close up to the very sills
of the lower windows, sending in morning fragrance, I doubt not, when
Dorothy thrust back the lattice after breakfast. A quiet place, “slow”
is the accurate modern epithet for it, “awfully slow.” But to Dorothy, a
quite suitable home at which she never repines.
This etching of Thomas Fisher, of December 26th, 1816, is a godsend to
me, hearing as I do that Chicksands Priory no longer remains to us,
having suffered martyrdom at the bloody hands of the restorer. For
through this, partly, we have attained to a knowledge of Dorothy’s
surroundings, and may now safely let Dorothy herself tell us of the
servants visiting her at Chicksands during those long seven years through
which she remains constant to Temple. See what she expects in a lover!
Have we not here some local squires hit off to the life? Could George
Eliot have done more for us in like space?
“There are a great many ingredients must go to the making me happy in a
husband. First, as my Cousin Franklin says our humours must agree, and to
do that he must have that kind of breeding that I have had, and used that
kind of company. That is, he must not be so much a country gentleman as
to understand nothing but hawks and dogs, and be fonder of either than
of his wife; nor of the next sort of them, whose aim reaches no farther
than to be Justice of Peace, and once in his life High Sheriff, who reads
no books but statutes, and studies nothing but how to make a speech
interlarded with Latin, that may amaze his disagreeing poor neighbours,
and fright them rather than persuade them into quietness. He must not be
a thing that began the world in a free school, was sent from thence to
the university, and is at his furthest when he reaches the Inns of Court,
has no acquaintance but those of his form in those places, speaks the
French he has picked out of old laws, and admires nothing but the stories
he has heard of the revels that were kept there before his time. He must
not be a town gallant neither, that lives in a tavern and an ordinary,
that cannot imagine how an hour should be spent without company unless
it be in sleeping, that makes court to all the women he sees, thinks
they believe him, and laughs and is laughed at equally. Nor a travelled
Monsieur, whose head is feather inside and outside, that can talk of
nothing but of dances and duels, and has courage enough to wear slashes,
when everybody else dies with cold to see him. He must not be a fool of
no sort, nor peevish, nor ill-natured, nor proud, nor courteous; and to
all this must be added, that he must love me, and I him, as much as we
are capable of loving. Without all this his fortune, though never so
great, would not satisfy me; and with it a very moderate one would keep
me from ever repenting my disposal.”
These negative needs doubtless excluded many of the neighbours who were
ready to throw themselves at her feet. But, from far and near, came many
suitors, Cromwell’s son, Henry, among others; who will be “as acceptable
to her,” she thinks, “as anybody else.” He seems almost worthy of her,
if we believe most accounts of him, and allow for the Presbyterian
animosity of good Mrs. Hutchinson. However, Henry Cromwell disappears
from the scene, marrying elsewhere; whereby English history is possibly
considerably modified. Temple is ordered to get her a dog, an Irish
greyhound. “Henry Cromwell undertook to write to his brother Fleetwood,
for another for me; but I have lost my hopes there; whomsoever it is that
you employ, he will need no other instruction, but to get the biggest he
can meet with. ’Tis all the beauty of those dogs, or of any, indeed, I
think. A mastiff is handsomer to me than the most exact little dog that
ever lady played withal.” Temple, no doubt, procured the biggest dog in
Ireland, not the less joyfully that “she has lost her hopes of Henry
Cromwell.”
There is another lover worthy of special mention—a widower—Sir Justinian
Isham, of Lamport, Northamptonshire, pragmatical enough in his love suit,
causing Mrs. Dorothy much amusement. She writes of him to Temple under
the nickname “The Emperor.” This is the character she gives him: “He was
the vainest, impertinent, self-conceited, learned coxcomb that ever yet I
saw.” Hard words these!
The Emperor, it appears, caused further disagreement between Dorothy and
her brother. Like the kettle in the _Cricket on the Hearth_, the Emperor
began it. “The Emperor and his proposals began it; I talked merrily
on’t till I saw my brother put on his sober face, and could hardly then
believe he was in earnest. It seems he was; for when I had spoke freely
my meaning, it wrought so with him, as to fetch up all that lay upon his
stomach. All the people that I had ever in my life refused were brought
again upon the stage, like Richard the III’s ghosts to reproach me
withal, and all the kindness his discoveries could make I had for you was
laid to my charge. My best qualities, if I have any that are good, served
but for aggravations of my fault, and I was allowed to have wit, and
understanding, and discretions, in all other things, that it might appear
I had none in this. Well, ’twas a pretty lecture, and I grew warm with it
after a while. In short, we came so near to an absolute falling out that
’twas time to give over, and we said so much then that we have hardly
spoken a word together since. But ’tis wonderful to see what curtseys and
legs pass between us, and as before we were thought the kindest brother
and sister, we are certainly now the most complimental couple in England.
’Tis a strange change, and I am very sorry for it, but I’ll swear I know
not how to help it.”
It is doubtless unpleasant to be pestered by an unwelcome suitor; however
Dorothy has this compensation, that the Emperor’s proposals and letters
give her mighty amusement.
“In my opinion, these great scholars are not the best writers (of
letters I mean, of books perhaps they are); I never had, I think, but one
letter from Sir Jus, but ’twas worth twenty of anybody’s else to make
me sport. It was the most sublime nonsense that in my life I ever read,
and yet I believe he descended as low as he could to come near my weak
understanding. ’Twill be no compliment after this to say I like your
letters in themselves, not as they come from one that is not indifferent
to me, but seriously I do. All letters, methinks, should be free and easy
as one’s discourse; not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words
like a charm. ’Tis an admirable thing to see how some people will labour
to find out terms that may obscure a plain sense, like a gentleman I
know, who would never say ‘the weather grew cold,’ but that ‘winter began
to salute us.’ I have no patience at such coxcombs, and cannot blame an
old uncle of mine that threw the standish at his man’s head, because
he writ a letter for him, where, instead of saying (as his master bid
him) ‘that he would have writ himself but that he had gout in his hand,’
he said, ‘that the gout in his hand would not permit him to put pen to
paper.’”
The Emperor, it seems, this much to his credit, is much enamoured of
Mrs. Dorothy; and does not take a refusal quietly. Or is she playing the
coquette with him?
“Would you think it, that I have an ambassador from the Emperor
Justinian, that comes to renew the treaty? In earnest ’tis true, and I
want your counsel extremely what to do in it. You told me once that of
all my servants you liked him the best. If I could so too, there were no
dispute in’t. Well, I’ll think on’t, and if it succeed I will be as good
as my word: you shall take your choice of my four daughters. Am not I
beholding to him, think you? He says he has made addresses, ’tis true, in
several places since we parted, but could not fix anywhere, and in his
opinion he sees nobody that would make so fit a wife for himself as I. He
has often inquired after me to know if I were not marrying: and somebody
told him I had an ague, and he presently fell sick of one too, so natural
a sympathy there is between us, and yet for all this, on my conscience
we shall never marry. He desires to know whether I am at liberty or
not. What shall I tell him, or shall I send him to you to know? I think
that will be best. I’ll say that you are much my friend, and that I am
resolved not to dispose of myself but with your consent and approbation;
and therefore he must make all his court to you, and when he can bring me
a certificate under your hand that you think him a fit husband for me,
’tis very likely I may have him; till then I am his humble servant, and
your faithful friend.”
But, at length Sir Justinian marries some other fair neighbour, and
vanishes from these pages; leaving, however, other lovers in the field
seeking Dorothy’s hand. “I have a squire now,” she writes, “that is as
good as a knight. He was coming as fast as a coach and six horses could
bring him, but I desired him to stay till my ague was gone, and give
me a little time to recover my good looks, for I protest if he saw me
now he would never desire to see me again. Oh, me! I cannot think how I
shall sit like the lady of the lobster, and give audience at Babram; you
have been there, I am sure, nobody at Cambridge ’scapes it, but you were
never so welcome thither as you shall be when I am mistress of it.” Also
there comes to woo her “a modest, melancholy, reserved man, whose head
is so taken up with little philosophical studies, that I admire how I
found a room there.” A new servant is offered to her: “who had £2000 a
year in present, with £2000 more to come. I had not the curiosity to ask
who he was, which they took so ill that I think I shall hear no more of
it.” Thus in one way or another, she gets rid of them all. But they are
very importunate, these “servants,” as they style themselves, requiring
wit and determination to send them about their business. Dorothy is
determined to marry where she loves. “Surely,” she says, “the whole world
could never persuade me (unless a parent commanded it) to marry one that
I had no esteem for.” It is doubtful if a parent’s command would suffice,
did Dorothy come face to face with such.
Here is a sharp refusal dramatically given to one importunate servant,
Mr. James Fish by name (fancy Dorothy Osborne as Mrs. Fish), who would
fain have become master. “I cannot forbear telling you the other day he
made me a visit; and I, to prevent his making discourses to me, made
Mrs. Goldsmith and Jane sit by all the while. But he came better provided
than I could have imagined. He brought a letter with him, and gave it
me as one that he had met with, directed to me; he thought it came out
of Northamptonshire. I was upon my guard, and suspecting all he said,
examined him so strictly where he had it, before I would open it, that he
was hugely confounded, and I confirmed that ’twas his. I laid it by, and
wished then that they would have left us, that I might have taken notice
on’t to him. But I had forbid it them so strictly before, that they
offered not to stir further than to look out of window, as not thinking
there was any necessity of giving us their eyes as well as their ears;
but he, that thought himself discovered, took that time to confess to me
(in a whispering voice that I could hardly hear myself), that the letter
(as my Lord Broghill says) was of great concern to him, and begged I
would read it, and give him my answer. I took it up presently, as if I
had meant it, but threw it sealed as it was into the fire, and told him
(as softly as he had spoke to me) I thought that the quickest and best
way of answering it. He sat awhile in great disorder without speaking
a word, and so rose and took his leave. Now what think you; shall I
ever hear of him more?” We think not, decidedly. He, like the others,
recovers, doubtless to marry elsewhere.
But Temple’s father, Dorothy’s brother, and her solicitous servants, are
not the only obstacles these lovers meet with. There are long separations
at great distances when the lovers can hear but little of each other. Few
meetings, and these at long intervals, break the monotony of Dorothy’s
life of love.
’Tis not the loss of love’s assurance,
It is not doubting what thou art,
But ’tis the too, too long endurance
Of absence, that afflicts my heart.
Thus would Dorothy have written, perhaps, had she rhymed her thoughts in
these days.
Now and again, indeed, Mrs. Dorothy is in London, “engaged to play and
sup at the Three Kings,” or at Spring Gardens, Foxhall; enjoying for the
time, as gay a life as is possible, in these Puritan days. But this is
not the life for our Dorothy. “We go abroad all day,” she writes, “and
play all night, and say our prayers when we have time. Well, in sober
earnest, now, I would not live thus a twelvemonth, _to gain all that
the king has lost, unless it was to give it him again_.” No! Dorothy’s
life is at Chicksands tending her father, writing to her lover, reading
romances sent to her by him, and crying real tears over the miseries of
their poor pasteboard heroines. In those days Fielding was not, and the
glories of fiction were unknown and quite unconceivable. Mr. Cowley’s
verses reach her (in MS. Courtenay thinks), and occasional news of
political matters. Here, set down in this dull priory house, she lives a
calm domestic life without repining, without sympathy in her troubles.
Is not this difficult; impossible to most, and worthy of a heroine? But,
though her life is at Chicksands, her heart is far away with Temple;
though her eyes are brimming with tears for the sorrows of Almanzar,
it is because they mirror her troubles in their own weak fashion; and,
whilst her soul is longing to commune with her lover, is it marvellous
that by some mesmeric culture, she, quite untrained in literary skill, so
portrays her thoughts that not only were they clearly uttered for Temple,
but remain to us, clothed in the power of clear intention, honesty of
expression, and kindly wit?
Perhaps, in these seven long apprentice years to matrimony, Dorothy
had no trouble causing her more real anguish than her fears concerning
Temple’s religious belief. Gossiping Bishop Burnet, in one of his more
ill-natured passages, tells us that Temple was an Epicurean, thinking
religion to be fit only for the mob; and a corrupter of all that came
near him. Unkind words these, with just perhaps those dregs of truth
in them, which make gossip so hard to bear patiently. Temple, I take
it, was too intelligent not to see the hollow, noisy, drum nature of
much of the religion around him; preferred also, as young men will
do, to air speculative opinions rather than consider them; hence the
bishop’s censure. Was it true, as Courtenay thinks, that jealousy of
King William’s attachment to Temple, disturbed the episcopal equipoise
of soul, rendering his Lordship slanderous, even a backbiter? To us,
brother servants of Dorothy, this matters not. Sufficient pity is it,
that Dorothy is forced to write to her lover in such words as these: “I
tremble at the desperate things you say in your letter: for the love of
God, consider seriously with yourself what can enter into comparison with
the safety of your soul? Are a thousand women or ten thousand worlds
worth it? No, you cannot have so little reason left as you pretend, nor
so little religion; for God’s sake let us not neglect what can only make
us happy for a trifle. If God had seen it fit to have satisfied our
desires, we should have had them, and everything would not have conspired
thus to cross them; since He has decreed it otherwise (at least as far as
we are able to judge by events) we must submit, and not by striving make
an innocent passion a sin, and show a childish stubbornness. I could say
a thousand things more to this purpose if I were not in haste to send
this away, that it may come to you at least as soon as the other.
Adieu.”
Thus, you see, Dorothy is not without her fears; but, though she can
write thus to her lover, yet, when he is attacked by her brother,
she is ready to defend him; having at heart that real faith in his
righteousness, without which there could be no love. “All this,” she
writes in another letter, “I can say to you; but when my brother disputes
it with me, I have other arguments for him, and I drove him up so
close t’other night, that for want of a better gap to get out at, he
was fain to say that he feared as much your having a fortune as your
having none, for he saw you held my Lord S.’s principles; that religion
and honour were things you did not consider at all; and that he was
confident you would take any engagement, serve in any employment, or do
anything to advance yourself. I had no patience for this: to say you were
a beggar, your father not worth £4,000 in the whole world, was nothing
in comparison of having no religion, nor no honour. I forgot all my
disguise, and we talked ourselves weary; he renounced me again, and I
defied him.”
There is no religious twaddle in Dorothy’s letters; her religion grew
from within herself, and was not the distorted reflection of Scriptural
beliefs coloured by modern sympathies and antipathies. She does not
satisfy her tendency towards righteousness by the mock humility of
constant self-abasement, or by the juggling misapplication of texts of
Scripture. Indeed, the depth of her faith and belief is not to be seen
on the surface of these letters—hardly, indeed, to be understood at
all, I think, except from the charitable tendency of her thoughts, her
deep silences and self-restraint. Dorothy, it appears, sees with her
clear smiling eyes quite through the loudly-expressed longings for the
next world, which had helped to put some prominent men of the time in
high places in this. “We complain,” she writes, “of this world and the
variety of crosses and afflictions it abounds in and yet for all this
who is weary on’t (more than in discourse), who thinks with pleasure of
leaving it or preparing for the next? We see old folks that have outlived
all the comforts of life desire to continue it and nothing can wean us
from the folly of preferring a mortal being, subject to great infirmity
and unavoidable decays, before an immortal one, and all the glories
that are promised with it. Is this not very like preaching? Well, ’tis
too good for you—you shall have no more on’t. I am afraid you are not
mortified enough for such discourses to work upon, though I am not of my
brother’s opinion neither, that you have no religion in you. In earnest,
I never took anything he ever said half so ill, as nothing is so great an
injury. It must suppose one to be the devil in human shape.”
Seven long years! Which of you, my readers, has waited this time without
a murmur and without a doubt? Was not this an acting of faith far
higher than any letter writing of it? Let us think so, and honour it
as such. Here is a letter, written when doubt almost overwhelmed, when
the _spleen_ (a disease as common now as then, though we have lost the
good name for it) was upon her, when the world looked blank, and life a
drifting mist of despair.
“Let me tell you that if I could help it I would not love you, and that
as long as I live I shall strive against it, as against that which has
been my ruin, and was certainly sent me as a punishment for my sins.
But I shall always have a sense of your misfortunes equal if not above
my own; I shall pray that you may obtain quiet I never hope for but in
my grave, and I shall never change my condition but with my life. Yet
let not this give you a hope. Nothing can ever persuade me to enter
the world again; I shall in a short time have disengaged myself of all
my little affairs in it and settled myself in a condition to apprehend
nothing but too long a life, and therefore I wish you to forget me, and
to induce you to it let me tell you freely that I deserve you should.
If I remember anybody ’tis against my will; I am possessed with that
strange insensibility that my nearest relations have no tie upon me,
and I find myself no more concerned in those that I have heretofore had
great tenderness of affection for, than if they had died long before I
was born; leave me to this, and seek a better fortune: I beg it of you
as heartily as I forgive you all those strange thoughts you have had of
me; think me so still if that will do anything towards it, for God’s sake
so, take any course that may make you happy, or if that cannot be, less
unfortunate at least than
Your friend and humble servant,