Thou canst not imagine how differently the servants, and even my cousins, look upon me, since yesterday, to what they did before.  Neither the one nor the other bow or courtesy half so low—­nor am I a quarter so often his honour and your honour, as I was within these few hours, with the former:  and as to the latter—­it is cousin Bobby again, with the usual familiarity, instead of Sir, and Sir, and If you please, Mr. Lovelace.  And now they have the insolence to congratulate me on the recovery of the best of uncles; while I am forced to seem as much delighted as they, when, would it do me good, I could sit down and cry my eyes out.

I had bespoke my mourning in imagination, after the example of a certain foreign minister, who, before the death, or even last illness of Charles II., as honest White Kennet tells us, had half exhausted Blackwell-hall of its sables—­an indication, as the historian would insinuate, that the monarch was to be poisoned, and the ambassador in the secret.—­And yet, fool that I was, I could not take the hint—­What the devil does a man read history for, if he cannot profit by the examples he find in it?

But thus, Jack, is an observation of the old Peer’s verified, that one misfortune seldom comes alone:  and so concludes

Thy doubly mortified
Lovelace.

LETTER L

Miss Clarissa Harlowe, to miss Howe
Wednesday night, June 28.

O MY DEAREST MISS HOWE!

Once more have I escaped—­But, alas!  I, my best self, have not escaped!  —­Oh! your poor Clarissa Harlowe! you also will hate me, I fear!——­

Yet you won’t, when you know all!

But no more of my self! my lost self.  You that can rise in a morning to be blest, and to bless; and go to rest delighted with your own reflections, and in your unbroken, unstarting slumbers, conversing with saints and angels, the former only more pure than yourself, as they have shaken off the incumbrance of body; you shall be my subject, as you have long, long, been my only pleasure.  And let me, at awful distance, revere my beloved Anna Howe, and in her reflect upon what her Clarissa Harlowe once was!

***

Forgive, O forgive my rambling.  My peace is destroyed.  My intellects are touched.  And what flighty nonsense must you read, if you now will vouchsafe to correspond with me, as formerly!

O my best, my dearest, my only friend! what a tale have I to unfold!—­ But still upon self, this vile, this hated self!—­I will shake it off, if possible; and why should I not, since I think, except one wretch, I hate nothing so much?  Self, then, be banished from self one moment (for I doubt it will be for no longer) to inquire after a dearer object, my beloved Anna Howe!—­whose mind, all robed in spotless white, charms and irradiates—­But what would I say?——­