ut the satisfaction I had proposed
to myself in seeing her.

It is very true, Colonel, said I: and I should have told you this before:
but your heat made me decline it; for, as I said, it had an appearance of
meanly capitulating with you. An abjectness of heart, of which, had I
been capable, I should have despised myself as much as I might have
expected you would despise me.

Lord M. proposed to enter into the proof of all this. He said, in his
phraseological way, That one story was good till another was heard; and
that the Harlowe family and I, 'twas true, had behaved like so many
Orsons to one another; and that they had been very free with all our
family besides: that nevertheless, for the lady's sake, more than for
their's, or even for mine, (he could tell me,) he would do greater things
for me than they could ask, if she could be brought to have me: and that
this he wanted to declare, and would sooner have declared, if he could
have brought us sooner to patience, and a good understanding.

The Colonel made excuses for his warmth, on the score of his affection to
his cousin.

My regard for her made me readily admit them: and so a fresh bottle of
Burgundy, and another of Champagne, being put upon the table, we sat down
in good humour, after all this blustering, in order to enter closer into
the particulars of the case: which I undertook, at both their desires, to
do.

But these things must be the subject of another letter, which shall
immediately follow this, if it do not accompany it.

Mean time you will observe that a bad cause gives a man great
disadvantages: for I myself thing that the interrogatories put to me with
so much spirit by the Colonel made me look cursedly mean; at the same
time that it gave him a superiority which I know not how to allow to the
best man in Europe. So that, literally speaking, as a good man would
infer, guilt is its own punisher: in that it makes the most lofty spirit
look like the miscreant he is--a good man, I say: So, Jack, proleptically
I add, thou hast no right to make the observation.

LETTER XL

MR. LOVELACE
[IN CONTINUATION.]
TUESDAY AFTERNOON, AUG. 29.

I went back, in this part of our conversation, to the day that I was
obliged to come down to attend my Lord in the dangerous illness which
some feared would have been his last.

I told the Colonel, 'what earnest letters I had written to a particular
friend, to engage him to prevail upon the lady not to sli