aiting at this place your commands, I am, Sir,

Your most faithful and obedient servant,
F.J. DE LA TOUR.

CONCLUSION

SUPPOSED TO BE WRITTEN BY MR. BELFORD

What remains to be mentioned for the satisfaction of such of the readers
as may be presumed to have interested themselves in the fortunes of those
other principals in the story, who survived Mr. Lovelace, will be found
summarily related as follows:

The news of Mr. LOVELACE's unhappy end was received with as much grief by
his own relations, as it was with exultation by the Harlowe family, and
by Miss Howe. His own family were most to be pitied, because, being
sincere admirers of the inimitable lady, they were greatly grieved for
the injustice done her; and now had the additional mortification of
losing the only male of it, by a violent death.

That his fate was deserved, was still a heightening of their calamity, as
they had, for that very reason, and his unpreparedness for it, but too
much ground for apprehension with regard to his future happiness. While
the other family, from their unforgiving spirit, and even the noble young
lady above mentioned, from her lively resentments, found his death some
little, some temporary, alleviation of the heavy loss they had sustained,
principally through his means.

Temporary alleviation, we repeat, as to the Harlowe family; for THEY were
far from being happy or easy in their reflections upon their own conduct.
--And still the less, as the inconsolable mother rested not till she had
procured, by means of Colonel Morden, large extracts from some of the
letters that compose this history, which convinced them all that the very
correspondence which Clarissa, while with them, renewed with Mr.
Lovelace, was renewed for their sakes, more than for her own: that she
had given him no encouragement contrary to her duty and to that prudence
for which she was so early noted: that had they trusted to a discretion
which they owned she had never brought into question, she would have
extricated them and herself (as she once proposed* to her mother) from
all difficulties as to Lovelace: that she, if any woman ever could, would
have given a glorious instance of a passion conquered, or at least kept
under by reason and by piety; the man being too immoral to be implicitly
beloved.

* See Vol. I. Letter XVII.

The unhappy parents and uncles, from the perusal of these extracts, too
evidently for their peace, saw that it was ent