I am sincerely rejoiced to hear that thou art already so much amended, as thy servant tells me thou art.  Thy letter looks as if thy morals were mending with thy health.  This was a letter I could show, as I did, to the lady.

She is very ill:  (cursed letters received from her implacable family!) so I could not have much conversation with her, in thy favour, upon it.—­But what passed will make thee more and more adore her.

She was very attentive to me, as I read it; and, when I had done, Poor man! said she; what a letter is this!  He had timely instances that my temper was not ungenerous, if generosity could have obliged him!  But his remorse, and that for his own sake, is all the punishment I wish him.—­ Yet I must be more reserved, if you write to him every thing I say!

I extolled her unbounded goodness—­how could I help it, though to her face!

No goodness in it! she said—­it was a frame of mind she had endeavoured after for her own sake.  She suffered too much in want of mercy, not to wish it to a penitent heart.  He seems to be penitent, said she; and it is not for me to judge beyond appearances.—­If he be not, he deceives himself more than any body else.

She was so ill that this was all that passed on the occasion.

What a fine subject for tragedy, would the injuries of this lady, and her behaviour under them, both with regard to her implacable friends, and to her persecutor, make!  With a grand objection as to the moral, nevertheless;* for here virtue is punished!  Except indeed we look forward to the rewards of hereafter, which, morally, she must be sure of, or who can?  Yet, after all, I know not, so sad a fellow art thou, and so vile an husband mightest thou have made, whether her virtue is not rewarded in missing thee:  for things the most grievous to human nature, when they happen, as this charming creature once observed, are often the happiest for us in the event.

* Mr. Belford’s objections, That virtue ought not to suffer in a tragedy, is not well considered:  Monimia in the Orphean, Belvidera in Venice Preserved, Athenais in Theodosius, Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Desdemona in Othello, Hamlet, (to name no more,) are instances that a tragedy could hardly be justly called a tragedy, if virtue did not temporarily suffer, and vice for a while triumph.  But he recovers himself in the same paragraph; and leads us to look up to the future for the reward of virtue, and for the punishment of guilt:  and observes not amiss, when he says, He knows not but that the virtue of such a woman as Clarissa is rewarded in missing such a man as Lovelace.

I have frequently thought, in my attendance on this lady, that if Belton’s admired author, Nic.  Rowe, had had such a character before him, he would have drawn another sort of penitent than he has done, or given his play, which he calls The Fair Penitent, a fitter title.  Miss Harlowe is a penitent indeed!  I think, if I am not guilty of a contradiction in terms; a penitent without a fault; her parents’ conduct towards her from the first considered.