But won’t you oblige me with the sequel of your letter to your father?  For, you promise, my dear charming scribbler, in that you sent me, to write again to his letter; and I long to see how you answer the latter part of it, about your relations desiring already to come and live with him.  I know what I expect from you.  But let it be what it will, send it to me exactly as you wrote it; and I shall see whether I have reason to praise or reprove you.  For surely, Pamela, you must leave one room to blame you for something.  Indeed I can hardly bear the thought, that you should so much excel as you do, and have more prudence, by nature, as it were, than the best of us get in a course of the genteelest educations and with fifty advantages, at least, in conversation, that you could not have, by reason of my mother’s retired life, while you were with her, and your close attendance on her person.

But I’ll tell you what has been a great improvement to you; it is your own writings.  This itch of scribbling has been a charming help.  For here, having a natural fund of good sense, and prudence above your years, you have, with the observations these have enabled you to make, been flint and steel too, as I may say, to yourself:  so that you have struck fire when you pleased, wanting nothing but a few dry leaves, like the first pair in old Du Bartas, to serve as tinder to catch your animating sparks.  So that reading constantly, and thus using yourself to write, and enjoying besides a good memory, every thing you heard and read became your own; and not only so, but was improved by passing through more salubrious ducts and vehicles; like some fine fruit grafted upon a common free-stock, whose more exuberant juices serve to bring to quicker and greater perfection the downy peach, or the smooth nectarine, with its crimson blush.

Really, Pamela, I believe, I, too, shall improve by writing to you-Why, you dear saucy-face, at this rate, you’ll make every one that converses with you, better, and wiser, and wittier too, as far as I know, than they ever before thought there was room for ’em to be.

As to my own part, I begin to like what I have written myself, I think; and your correspondence may revive the poetical ideas that used to fire my mind, before I entered into the drowsy married life; for my good Lord Davers’s turn happens not to be to books; and so by degrees my imagination was in a manner quenched, and I, as a dutiful wife should, endeavoured to form my taste by that of the man I chose.—­But, after all, Pamela, you are not to be a little proud of my correspondence; and I could not have thought it ever would have come to this; but you will observe, that I am the more free and unreserved, to encourage you to write without restraint:  for already you have made us a family of writers and readers; so that Lord Davers himself is become enamoured of your letters, and desires of all things he may hear