I know thou wilt think I am going to claim some merit to myself, for having given her such opportunities of signalizing her virtues.  But I am not; for, if I did, I must share that merit with her implacable relations, who would justly be entitled to two-thirds of it, at least:  and my soul disdains a partnership in any thing with such a family.

But this I mention as an answer to thy reproaches, that I could be so little edified by perfections, to which, thou supposest, I was for so long together daily and hourly a personal witness—­when, admirable as she was in all she said, and in all she did, occasion had not at that time ripened, and called forth, those amazing perfections which now astonish and confound me.

Hence it is that I admire her more than ever; and that my love for her is less personal, as I may say, more intellectual, than ever I thought it could be to a woman.

Hence also it is that I am confident (would it please the Fates to spare her, and make her mine) I could love her with a purity that would draw on my own future, as well as ensure her temporal, happiness.—­And hence, by necessary consequence, shall I be the most miserable of all men, if I am deprived of her.

Thou severely reflectest upon me for my levity:  the Abbey instance in thine eye, I suppose.  And I will be ingenuous enough to own, that as thou seest not my heart, there may be passages, in every one of my letters, which (the melancholy occasion considered) deserve thy most pointed rebukes.  But faith, Jack, thou art such a tragi-comical mortal, with thy leaden aspirations at one time, and thy flying hour-glasses and dreaming terrors at another, that, as Prior says, What serious is, thou turn’st to farce; and it is impossible to keep within the bounds of decorum or gravity when one reads what thou writest.

But to restrain myself (for my constitutional gayety was ready to run away with me again) I will repeat, I must ever repeat, that I am most egregiously affected with the circumstances of the case:  and, were this paragon actually to quit the world, should never enjoy myself one hour together, though I were to live to the age of Methusalem.

Indeed it is to this deep concern, that my levity is owing:  for I struggle and struggle, and try to buffet down my cruel reflections as they rise; and when I cannot, I am forced, as I have often said, to try to make myself laugh, that I may not cry; for one or other I must do:  and is it not philosophy carried to the highest pitch, for a man to conquer such tumults of soul as I am sometimes agitated by, and, in the very height of the storm, to be able to quaver out an horse-laugh?

Your Seneca’s, your Epictetus’s, and the rest of your stoical tribe, with all their apathy nonsense, could not come up to this.  They could forbear wry faces:  bodily pains they could well enough seem to support; and that was all:  but the pangs of their own smitten-down souls they could not laugh over, though they could at the follies of others.  They read grave lectures; but they were grave.  This high point of philosophy, to laugh and be merry in the midst of the most soul-harrowing woes, when the heart-strings are just bursting asunder, was reserved for thy Lovelace.