followed Lord M.'s proposal
for my sister: and this was an additional felicity for the time. I have
told you how exceedingly good-humoured it made my sister.

You know how that went off: you know what came on in its place.

My brother then returned; and we were all wrong again: and Bella, as
I observed in my letters abovementioned, had an opportunity to give
herself the credit of having refused Mr. Lovelace, on the score of his
reputed faulty morals. This united my brother and sister in one cause.
They set themselves on all occasions to depreciate Mr. Lovelace, and his
family too (a family which deserves nothing but respect): and this gave
rise to the conversation I am leading to, between my uncles and them: of
which I now come to give the particulars; after I have observed, that it
happened before the rencounter, and soon after the inquiry made into Mr.
Lovelace's affairs had come out better than my brother and sister hoped
it would.*

* See Letter IV.

They were bitterly inveighing against him, in their usual way,
strengthening their invectives with some new stories in his disfavour,
when my uncle Antony, having given them a patient hearing, declared,
'That he thought the gentleman behaved like a gentleman; his niece Clary
with prudence; and that a more honourable alliance for the family, as he
had often told them, could not be wished for: since Mr. Lovelace had a
very good paternal estate; and that, by the evidence of an enemy,
all clear. Nor did it appear, that he was so bad a man as he had been
represented to be: wild indeed; but it was a gay time of life: he was a
man of sense: and he was sure that his niece would not have him, if
she had not good reason to think him reformed, or that there was a
likelihood that she could reform him by her example.'

My uncle then gave one instance, my aunt told me, as a proof of a
generosity in Mr. Lovelace's spirit, which convinced him that he was not
a bad man in nature; and that he was of a temper, he was pleased to say,
like my own; which was, That when he (my uncle) had represented to him,
that he might, if he pleased, make three or four hundred pounds a year
of his paternal estate, more than he did; he answered, 'That his tenants
paid their rents well: that it was a maxim with his family, from which
he would by no means depart, Never to rack-rent old tenants, or their
descendants; and that it was a pleasure to him, to see all his tenants
look fat, sleek, and conten