Be sure you chide me for my whimsical behaviour to Lord G——.  I know you will.  But don’t blame my heart:  my head only is wrong.

***

A little more from fresh informations of this sorry varlet Everard.  I wished him to suffer; but I wished him not to be so very great a sufferer as it seems he is.  Sharpers have bit his head off, quite close to his shoulders:  they have not left it him to carry under his arm, as the honest patron of France did his.  They lend it him, however, now and then, to repent with, and curse himself.  The creature he attended to Cuper’s Gardens, instead of a country innocent, as he expected her to be, comes out to be a cast mistress, experienced in all the arts of such, and acting under the secret influences of a man of quality; who, wanting to get rid of her, supports her in a prosecution commenced against him (poor devil!) for performance of covenants.  He was extremely mortified, on finding my brother gone abroad:  he intends to apply to him for his pity and help.  Sorry fellow!  He boasted to us, on our expectation of our brother’s arrival from abroad, that he would enter his cousin Charles into the ways of the town.  Now he wants to avail himself against the practices of the sons of that town by his cousin’s character and consequence.

A combination of sharpers, it seems, had long set him as a man of fortune:  but, on his taking refuge with my brother, gave over for a time their designs upon him, till he threw himself again in their way.

The worthless fellow had been often liberal of his promises of marriage to young creatures of more innocence than this; and thinks it very hard that he should be prosecuted for a crime which he had so frequently committed with impunity.  Can you pity him?  I cannot, I assure you.  The man who can betray and ruin an innocent woman, who loves him, ought to be abhorred by men.  Would he scruple to betray and ruin them, if he were not afraid of the law?—­Yet there are women, who can forgive such wretches, and herd with them.

My aunt Eleanor is arrived:  a good, plump, bonny-faced old virgin.  She has chosen her apartment.  At present we are most prodigiously civil to each other:  but already I suspect she likes Lord G——­ better than I would have her.  She will perhaps, if a party should be formed against your poor Charlotte, make one of it.

Will you think it time thrown away, to read a further account of what is come to hand about the wretches who lately, in the double sense of the word, were overtaken between St. Denis and Paris?

Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, it seems, still keeps his chamber:  he is thought not to be out of danger from some inward hurt, which often makes him bring up blood in quantities.  He is miserably oppressed by lowness of spirits; and when he is a little better in that respect, his impatience makes his friends apprehensive for his head.  But has he intellects strong enough to give apprehensions of that nature?  Fool and madman we often join as terms of reproach; but I believe, fools seldom run really mad.