I arrived in town yesterday, after a tolerably pleasant journey (considering the hot weather and dusty roads).  I put up at the Bull and Gate in Holborn, and hastened to Covent-garden.  I soon found the house where the unhappy lady lodgeth.  And, in the back shop, had a good deal of discourse* with Mrs. Smith, (her landlady,) whom I found to be so ’highly prepossessed’** in her ‘favour,’ that I saw it would not answer your desires to take my informations ‘altogether’ from her:  and being obliged to attend my patron, (who to my sorrow,

* See Vol.  VII.  Letter LXXXI. ** Transcriber’s note:  Mr. Brand’s letters are characterized by a style that makes excessive use of italics for emphasis.  Although in the remainder of Clarissa I have largely disregarded italics for the sake of plain-text formatting, this style makes such emphatic use of italics that I have indicated all such instances in his letters by placing the italicized words and phrases in quotations, thus ’ ’.

      ‘Miserum et aliena vivere quadra,’)

I find wanteth much waiting upon, and is ‘another’ sort of man than he was at college:  for, Sir, ‘inter nos,’ ‘honours change manners.’  For the ‘aforesaid causes,’ I thought it would best answer all the ends of the commission with which you honoured me, to engage, in the desired scrutiny, the wife of a ‘particular friend,’ who liveth almost over-against the house where she lodgeth, and who is a gentlewoman of ‘character,’ and ‘sobriety,’ a ‘mother of children,’ and one who ‘knoweth’ the ‘world’ well.

To her I applied myself, therefore, and gave her a short history of the case, and desired she would very particularly inquire into the ‘conduct’ of the unhappy young lady; her ‘present way of life’ and ‘subsistence’; her ‘visiters,’ her ‘employments,’ and such-like:  for these, Sir, you know, are the things whereof you wished to be informed.

Accordingly, Sir, I waited upon the gentlewoman aforesaid, this day; and, to ‘my’ very great trouble, (because I know it will be to ‘your’s,’ and likewise to all your worthy family’s,) I must say, that I do find things look a little more ‘darkly’ than I hoped the would.  For, alas!  Sir, the gentlewoman’s report turneth out not so ‘favourable’ for Miss’s reputation, as ‘I’ wished, as ‘you’ wished, and as ‘every one’ of her friends wished.  But so it is throughout the world, that ‘one false step’ generally brings on ‘another’; and peradventure ‘a worse,’ and ’a still worse’; till the poor ‘limed soul’ (a very fit epithet of the Divine Quarles’s!) is quite ‘entangled,’ and (without infinite mercy) lost for ever.