Where thou callest thyself a villanous plotter; ’To take a crime to himself, said she, without shame, O what a hardened wretch is this man!’

On that passage, where thou sayest, Let me know how she has been treated:  if roughly, woe be to the guilty! this was her remark, with an air of indignation:  ’What a man is your friend, Sir!—­Is such a one as he to set himself up to punish the guilty?—­All the rough usage I could receive from them, was infinitely less’—­And there she stopt a moment or two:  then proceeding—­’And who shall punish him? what an assuming wretch!—­ Nobody but himself is entitled to injure the innocent;—­he is, I suppose, on the earth, to act the part which the malignant fiend is supposed to act below—­dealing out punishments, at his pleasure, to every inferior instrument of mischief!’

What, thought I, have I been doing!  I shall have this savage fellow think I have been playing him booty, in reading part of his letter to this sagacious lady!—­Yet, if thou art angry, it can only, in reason, be at thyself; for who would think I might not communicate to her some of thy sincerity in exculpating thyself from a criminal charge, which thou wrotest to thy friend, to convince him of thy innocence?  But a bad heart, and a bad cause are confounded things:  and so let us put it to its proper account.

I passed over thy charge to me, to curse them by the hour; and thy names of dragon and serpents, though so applicable; since, had I read them, thou must have been supposed to know from the first what creatures they were; vile fellow as thou wert, for bringing so much purity among them!  And I closed with thy own concluding paragraph, A line! a line! a kingdom for a line! &c.  However, telling her (since she saw that I omitted some sentences) that there were farther vehemences in it; but as they were better fitted to show to me the sincerity of the writer than for so delicate an ear as her’s to hear, I chose to pass them over.

You have read enough, said she—­he is a wicked, wicked man!—­I see he intended to have me in his power at any rate; and I have no doubt of what his purposes were, by what his actions have been.  You know his vile Tomlinson, I suppose—­You know—­But what signifies talking?—­Never was there such a premeditated false heart in man, [nothing can be truer, thought I!] What has he not vowed! what has he not invented! and all for what?—­Only to ruin a poor young creature, whom he ought to have protected; and whom he had first deceived of all other protection!

She arose and turned from me, her handkerchief at her eyes:  and, after a pause, came towards me again—­’I hope, said she, I talk to a man who has a better heart:  and I thank you, Sir, for all your kind, though ineffectual pleas in my favour formerly, whether the motives for them were compassion, or principle, or both.  That they were ineffectual, might very probably be owing to your want of earnestness; and that, as you might think, to my want of merit.  I might not, in your eye, deserve to be saved!—­I might appear to you a giddy creature, who had run away from her true and natural friends; and who therefore ought to take the consequence of the lot she had drawn.’