The silks I have purchas’d for your Ladyship are slight, as you directed, except a white and gold, which is the richest and most beautiful I could procure.

How imperceptibly time slides on?—­The clock strikes eleven,—­in spight of the desire I have of communicating many things more.—­An engagement to be with Lady Powis at twelve hastens me to conclude myself

Your Ladyship’s

Most honour’d and affectionate,

F. WARLEY.

LETTER IX.

The Honourable GEORGE MOLESWORTH to LORD DARCEY.

Bath.

What a sacrifice do you offer up to that old dog Plutus!—­I have lost all patience,—­all patience, I say.—­Such a woman!—­such an angelic woman!—­But what has,—­what will avail my arguments?—­Her peace is gone,—­if you persevere in a behaviour so particular,—­absolutely gone.

Bridgman this morning told me, that unless I assured him you had pretensions to Miss Warley, he was determined to offer her his hand;—­that nothing prevented him from doing it whilst at the Abbey, but your mysterious conduct, which he was at a loss how to construe.  —­Not to offend you, the Lady or family she is with, he apply’d, he said, to me, as a friend of each party, to set him right.

Surely, Bridgman, returned I, you wish to keep yourself in the dark; or how the duce have you been six days with people whose countenances speak so much sensibility, and not make the discovery you seek after?

Though her behaviour to us; continued I, was politeness itself, was there nothing more than politeness in her address to Lord Darcey?—­Her smiles too, in which Diana and the Graces revel, saw you not them, how they played from one to another, like sun-beams on the water, until they fixed on him?—­Is the nation in debt?—­So much is Darcey in love;—­and you may as well pay off one, as rival the other with success.

Observe, my friend, in what manner I have answered for you.—­Keep her, therefore, no longer in suspence.—­Delays of this sort are not only dangerous, but cruel.—­Why delight to torture what we most admire?—­From a boy you despised such actions.—­Often have I known Dick Jones, when at Westminster, threshed by your hand for picking poor little birds alive.—­His was an early point;—­but for Darcey, accoutred with the breast-plate of honour, even before he could read the word that signifies its intrinsic value,—­for him to be falling off,—­falling off at a time too, when Virtue herself appears in person to support him!

Can you say, you mean not to injure her?—­Is a woman only to be injured, but by an attempt on her virtue?—­Is it no crime, no fault, to cheat a young innocent lovely girl out of her affections, and give her nothing in return but regret and disappointment?