How, indeed, can it be, if this point be duly weighed, that a man who thinks alike of all the sex, and knows it to be in the power of a wife to do him the greatest dishonour man can receive, and doubts not her will to do it, if opportunity offer, and importunity be not wanting:  that such a one, from principle, should be a good husband to any woman?  And, indeed, little do innocents think, what a total revolution of manners, what a change of fixed habits, nay, what a conquest of a bad nature, and what a portion of Divine grace, is required, to make a man a good husband, a worthy father, and true friend, from principle; especially when it is considered, that it is not in a man’s own power to reform when he will.  This, (to say nothing of my own experience,) thou, Lovelace, hast found in the progress of thy attempts upon the divine Miss Harlowe.  For whose remorses could be deeper, or more frequent, yet more transient than thine!

Now, Lovelace, let me know if the word grace can be read from my pen without a sneer from thee and thy associates?  I own that once it sounded oddly in my ears.  But I shall never forget what a grave man once said on this very word—­that with him it was a rake’s sibboleth.* He had always hopes of one who could bear the mention of it without ridiculing it; and ever gave him up for an abandoned man, who made a jest of it, or of him who used it.

* See Judges xii. 6.

Don’t be disgusted, that I mingle such grave reflections as these with my narratives.  It becomes me, in my present way of thinking, to do so, when I see, in Miss Harlowe, how all human excellence, and in poor Belton, how all inhuman libertinism, and am near seeing in this abandoned woman, how all diabolical profligacy, end.  And glad should I be for your own sake, for your splendid family’s sake, and for the sake of all your intimates and acquaintance, that you were labouring under the same impressions, that so we who have been companions in (and promoters of one another’s) wickedness, might join in a general atonement to the utmost of our power.

I came home reflecting upon all these things, more edifying to me than any sermon I could have heard preached:  and I shall conclude this long letter with observing, that although I left the wretched howler in a high phrensy-fit, which was excessively shocking to the by-standers; yet her phrensy must be the happiest part of her dreadful condition:  for when she is herself, as it is called, what must be her reflections upon her past profligate life, throughout which it has been her constant delight and business, devil-like, to make others as wicked as herself!  What must her terrors be (a hell already begun in her mind!) on looking forward to the dreadful state she is now upon the verge of!—­But I drop my trembling pen.

To have done with so shocking a subject at once, we shall take notice,
      that Mr. Belford, in a future letter, writes, that the miserable
      woman, to the surprise of the operators themselves, (through hourly
      increasing tortures of body and mind,) held out so long as till
      Thursday, Sept. 21; and then died in such agonies as terrified into
      a transitory penitence all the wretches about her.