me (as I expect you will) to Dover, if not cross the water. I
must leave you and them good friends. They take extremely amiss the
treatment you have given them in your last letters. They say, you strike
at their understandings. I laugh at them; and tell them, that those
people who have least, are the most apt to be angry when it is called
into question.

Make up all the papers and narratives you can spare me against the time.
The will, particularly, I expect to take with me. Who knows but that
those things, which will help to secure you in the way you are got into,
may convert me?

Thou talkest of a wife, Jack: What thinkest you of our Charlotte? Her
family and fortune, I doubt, according to thy scheme, are a little too
high. Will those be an objection? Charlotte is a smart girl. For piety
(thy present turn) I cannot say much: yet she is as serious as most of
her sex at her time of life--Would flaunt it a little, I believe, too,
like the rest of them, were her reputation under covert.

But it won't do neither, now I think of it:--Thou art so homely, and so
awkward a creature! Hast such a boatswain-like air!--People would think
she had picked thee up in Wapping, or Rotherhithe; or in going to see
some new ship launched, or to view the docks at Chatham, or Portsmouth.
So gaudy and so clumsy! Thy tawdriness won't do with Charlotte!--So sit
thee down contented, Belford: although I think, in a whimsical way, as
now, I mentioned Charlotte to thee once before.* Yet would I fain secure
thy morals too, if matrimony will do it.--Let me see!--Now I have it.----
Has not the widow Lovick a daughter, or a niece? It is not every girl of
fortune and family that will go to prayers with thee once or twice a day.
But since thou art for taking a wife to mortify with, what if thou
marriest the widow herself?--She will then have a double concern in thy
conversation. You and she may, tete a tete, pass many a comfortable
winter's evening together, comparing experiences, as the good folks call
them.

* See the Postscript to Letter XL. of Vol. VIII.

I am serious, Jack, faith I am. And I would have thee take it into thy
wise consideration.

R.L.

Mr. Belford returns a very serious answer to the preceding letter; which
appears not.

In it, he most heartily wishes that he had withstood Mr. Lovelace,
whatever had been the consequence, in designs so elaborately base
and ungrateful, and so long and st