“It will be necessary, moreover, that she should have a mind above temptation; that she should resist the offers and menaces of one upon whom all her worldly happiness seemed to depend; the son of a lady to whom she owed the greatest obligations; a person whom she did not hate, but greatly feared, and whom her grateful heart would have been glad to oblige; and who sought to prevail over her virtue, by all the inducements that could be thought of, to attract a young unexperienced virgin at one time, or to frighten her at another, into his purposes; who offered her very high terms, her circumstances considered, as well for herself, as for parents she loved better than herself, whose circumstances were low and distressful; yet, to all these offers and menaces, that she should be able to answer in such words as these, which will always dwell upon my memory—­’I reject your proposals with all my soul.  May God desert me, whenever I make worldly grandeur my chiefest good!  I know I am in your power; I dread your will to ruin me is as great as your power.  Yet, will I dare to tell you, I will make no free-will offering of my virtue.  All that I can do, poor as it is, I will do, to shew you, that my will bore no part in the violation of me.’  And when future marriage was intimated to her, to induce her to yield, to be able to answer, ’The moment I yield to your proposals, there is an end of all merit, if now I have any.  And I should be so far from expecting such an honour that I will pronounce I should be most unworthy of it.’

“If, I say, such a girl can be found, thus beautifully attractive in every one’s eye, and not partially so only in a young gentle man’s own; and after that (what good persons would infinitely prefer to beauty), thus piously principled; thus genteely educated and accomplished; thus brilliantly witty; thus prudent, modest, generous, undesigning; and having been thus tempted, thus tried, by the man she hated not, pursued (not intriguingly pursuing), be thus inflexibly virtuous, and proof against temptation:  let her reform her libertine, and let him marry her; and were he of princely extraction, I dare answer for it, that no two princes in one age, take the world through, would be in danger.  For, although I am sensible it is not to my credit, I will say, that I never met with a repulse, nor a conduct like this; and yet I never sunk very low for the subjects of my attempts, either at home or abroad.  These are obvious inferences,” added he, “not refinements upon my Pamela’s story; and if the gentlemen were capable of thought and comparison, would rather make such an example, as is apprehended, more than less difficult than before.