on in you. May it
be so! You are a man of sense: O may it be so! Now is your time! Now,
that you are in full vigour of mind and body!--But your poor Belton,
alas! your poor Belton kept his vices, till they left him--and see the
miserable effects in debility of mind and despondency! Were Mowbray
here, and were he to laugh at me, I would own that this is the cause of
my despair--that God's justice cannot let his mercy operate for my
comfort: for, Oh! I have been very, very wicked; and have despised the
offers of his grace, till he has withdrawn it from me for ever.

I used all the arguments I could think of to give him consolation: and
what I said had such an effect upon him, as to quiet his mind for the
greatest part of the day; and in a lucid hour his memory served him to
repeat these lines of Dryden, grasping my hand, and looking wistfully
upon me:

O that I less could fear to lose this being,
Which, like a snow-ball, in my coward hand,
The more 'tis grasped, the faster melts away!

In the afternoon of Sunday, he was inquisitive after you, and your
present behaviour to Miss Harlowe. I told him how you had been, and how
light you made of it. Mowbray was pleased with your impenetrable
hardness of heart, and said, Bob. Lovelace was a good edge-tool, and
steel to the back: and such coarse but hearty praises he gave you, as an
abandoned man might give, and only an abandoned man could wish to
deserve.

But hadst thou heard what the poor dying Belton said on this occasion,
perhaps it would have made thee serious an hour or two, at least.

'When poor Lovelace is brought,' said he, 'to a sick-bed, as I am now,
and his mind forebodes that it is impossible he should recover, (which
his could not do in his late illness: if it had, he could not have
behaved so lightly in it;) when he revolves his past mis-spent life; his
actions of offence to helpless innocents; in Miss Harlowe's case
particularly; what then will he think of himself, or of his past actions?
his mind debilitated; his strength turned into weakness; unable to stir
or to move without help; not one ray of hope darting in upon his
benighted soul; his conscience standing in the place of a thousand
witnesses; his pains excruciating; weary of the poor remnant of life he
drags, yet dreading, that, in a few short hours, his bad will be changed
to worse, nay, to worst of all; and that worst of all, to last beyond
time and to all eternity; O Jack!