She approves of my proposal of Mrs. Fretchville’s house.  She puts her upon expecting settlements; upon naming a day:  and concludes with insisting upon her writing, notwithstanding her mother’s prohibitions; or bids her ‘take the consequence.’  Undutiful wretches!  How I long to vindicate against them both the insulted parental character!

Thou wilt say to thyself, by this time, And can this proud and insolent girl be the same Miss Howe, who sighed for an honest Sir George Colmar; and who, but for this her beloved friend, would have followed him in all his broken fortunes, when he was obliged to quit the kingdom?

Yes, she is the very same.  And I always found in others, as well as in myself, that a first passion thoroughly subdued, made the conqueror of it a rover; the conqueress a tyrant.

Well, but now comes mincing in a letter, from one who has ’the honour of dear Miss Howe’s commands’* to acquaint Miss Harlowe, that Miss Howe is ‘excessively concerned for the concern she has given her.’

* See Vol.  IV.  Letter XII.

‘I have great temptations, on this occasion,’ says the prim Gothamite, ‘to express my own resentments upon your present state.’

’My own resentments!’——­And why did he not fall into this temptation?  —­Why, truly, because he knew not what that state was which gave him so tempting a subject—­only by a conjecture, and so forth.

He then dances in his style, as he does in his gait!  To be sure, to be sure, he must have made the grand tour, and come home by way of Tipperary.

‘And being moreover forbid,’ says the prancer, ’to enter into the cruel subject.’—­This prohibition was a mercy to thee, friend Hickman!—­But why cruel subject, if thou knowest not what it is, but conjecturest only from the disturbance it gives to a girl, that is her mother’s disturbance, will be thy disturbance, and the disturbance, in turn, of every body with whom she is intimately acquainted, unless I have the humbling of her?

In another letter,* the little fury professes, ’that she will write, and that no man shall write for her,’ as if some medium of that kind had been proposed.  She approves of her fair friend’s intention ’to leave me, if she can be received by her relations.  I am a wretch, a foolish wretch.  She hates me for my teasing ways.  She has just made an acquaintance with one who knows a vast deal of my private history.’  A curse upon her, and upon her historiographer!—­’The man is really a villain, an execrable one.’  Devil take her!—­’Had I a dozen lives, I might have forfeited them all twenty crimes ago.’  An odd way of reckoning, Jack!

* See Letter XXIII. of this volume.

Miss Betterton, Miss Lockyer, are named—­the man, (she irreverently repeats) she again calls a villain.  Let me perish, I repeat, if I am called a villain for nothing!—­She ‘will have her uncle,’ as Miss Harlowe requests, ’sounded about receiving her.  Dorcas is to be attached to her interest:  my letters are to be come at by surprise or trick’—­