From death we rose to life:  ’tis but the same,
      Through life to pass again from whence we came. 
      With shame we see our passions can prevail,
      Where reason, certainty, and virtue fail. 
      Honour, that empty name, can death despise; |
      SCORN’D love to death, as to a refuge, flies; |
      And sorrow waits for death with longing eyes. |
      Hope triumphs o’er the thoughts of death; and fate
      Cheats fools, and flatters the unfortunate. 
      We fear to lose, what a small time must waste,
      Till life itself grows the disease at last. 
      Begging for life, we beg for more decay,
      And to be long a dying only pray.

In the disposition of what belongs to me, I have endeavoured to do every thing in the justest and best manner I could think of; putting myself in my relations’ places, and, in the greater points, ordering my matters as if no misunderstanding had happened.

I hope they will not think much of some bequests where wanted, and where due from my gratitude:  but if they should, what is done, is done; and I cannot now help it.  Yet I must repeat, that I hope, I hope, I have pleased every one of them.  For I would not, on any account, have it thought that, in my last disposition, any thing undaughterly, unsisterly, or unlike a kinswoman, should have had place in a mind that is a truly free (as I will presume to say) from all resentment, that it now overflows with gratitude and blessings for the good I have received, although it be not all that my heart wished to receive.  Were it even an hardship that I was not favoured with more, what is it but an hardship of half a year, against the most indulgent goodness of eighteen years and an half, that ever was shown to a daughter?

My cousin, you tell me, thinks I was off my guard, and that I was taken at some advantage.  Indeed, my dear, I was not.  Indeed I gave no room for advantage to be taken of me.  I hope, one day, that will be seen, if I have the justice done me which Mr. Belford assures me of.

I should hope that my cousin has not taken the liberties which you (by an observation not, in general, unjust) seem to charge him with.  For it is sad to think, that the generality of that sex should make so light of crimes, which they justly hold so unpardonable in their own most intimate relations of our’s—­yet cannot commit them without doing such injuries to other families as they think themselves obliged to resent unto death, when offered to their own.

But we women are to often to blame on this head; since the most virtuous among us seldom make virtue the test of their approbation of the other sex; insomuch that a man may glory in his wickedness of this sort without being rejected on that account, even to the faces of women of unquestionable virtue.  Hence it is, that a libertine seldom thinks himself concerned so much as to save appearances:  And what is it not that our sex suffers in their opinion on this very score?  And what have I, more than many others, to answer for on this account in the world’s eye?