I am very happy, as I said before, in the favour of Lady and Lord L——­, and Lady and Lord G——­; but I never shall be so happy, as when I had the addition of your charming company.  I miss you and my guardian:  O, how I miss you both!  But, dearest Miss Byron, love me not the less, though now I have put pen to paper, and you see what a poor creature I am in my writing.  Many a one, I believe, may be thought tolerable in conversation; but when they are so silly as to put pen to paper, they expose themselves; as I have done, in this long piece of scribble.  But accept it, nevertheless, for the true love I bear you; and a truer love never flamed in any bosom, to any one the most dearly beloved, than does in mine for you.

I am afraid I have written arrant nonsense, because I knew not how to express half the love that is in the heart of

Your ever-obliged and affectionate
Emily Jervois.

LETTER XXXIX

Miss Byron, to lady G——­
Tuesday, may 2.

I have no patience with you, Lady G——.  You are ungenerously playful!  Thank Heaven, if this be wit, that I have none of it.  But what signifies expostulating with one who knows herself to be faulty, and will not amend?  How many stripes, Charlotte, do you deserve?—­But you never spared any body, not even your brother, when the humour was upon you.  So make haste; and since you will lay in stores for repentance, fill up your measure as fast as you can.

’Reveal to you the state of my heart!’—­Ah, my dear! it is an unmanageable one.  ’Greatness of mind!’—­I don’t know what it is!—­All his excellencies, his greatness, his goodness, his modesty, his cheerfulness under such afflictions as would weigh down every other heart that had but half the compassion in it with which his overflows—­Must not all other men appear little, and, less than little, nothing, in my eyes?  —­It is an instance of patience in me, that I can endure any of them who pretend to regard me out of my own family.

I thought, that when I got down to my dear friends here, I should be better enabled, by their prudent counsels, to attain the desirable frame of mind which I had promised myself:  but I find myself mistaken.  My grandmamma and aunt are such admirers of him, take such a share in the disappointment, that their advice has not the effect I had hoped it would have.  Lucy, Nancy, are perpetually calling upon me to tell them something of Sir Charles Grandison; and when I begin, I know not how to leave off.  My uncle rallies me, laughs at me, sometimes reminds me of what he calls my former brags.  I did not brag, my dear:  I only hoped, that respecting as I did every man according to his merit, I should never be greatly taken with any one, before duty added force to the inclination.  Methinks the company of the friends I am with, does not satisfy me; yet they never were dearer to me than they now are.  I want to have Lord and Lady L——­, Lord and Lady G——­, Dr. Bartlett, my Emily, with me.  To lose you all at once!—­is hard!—­There seems to be a strange void in my heart—­And so much, at present, for the state of that heart.