speak
freely of those we love and honour, when grief from imagined hard
treatment wrings the heart: but it goes against one to hear any body
else take the same liberties. Then you have so very strong a manner of
expression where you take a distaste, that when passion has subdued,
and I come (upon reflection) to see by your severity what I have given
occasion for, I cannot help condemning myself.

But least of all can I bear that you should reflect upon my mother.
What, my dear, if her meekness should not be rewarded? Is the want of
reward, or the want even of a grateful acknowledgement, a reason for us
to dispense with what we think our duty? They were my father's lively
spirits that first made him an interest in her gentle bosom. They were
the same spirits turned inward, as I have heretofore observed,* that
made him so impatient when the cruel malady seized him. He always loved
my mother: And would not LOVE and PITY excusably, nay laudably, make a
good wife (who was an hourly witness of his pangs, when labouring under
a paroxysm, and his paroxysms becoming more and more frequent, as well
as more and more severe) give up her own will, her own likings,
to oblige a husband, thus afflicted, whose love for her was
unquestionable?--And if so, was it not too natural [human nature is not
perfect, my dear] that the husband thus humoured by the wife, should be
unable to bear controul from any body else, much less contradiction from
his children?

* See Letter V.

If then you would avoid my highest displeasure, you must spare my
mother: and, surely, you will allow me, with her, to pity, as well as to
love and honour my father.

I have no friend but you to whom I can appeal, to whom I dare complain.
Unhappily circumstanced as I am, it is but too probable that I shall
complain, because it is but too probably that I shall have more and more
cause given me for complaint. But be it your part, if I do, to sooth my
angry passions, and to soften my resentments; and this the rather, as
you know what an influence your advice has upon me; and as you must
also know, that the freedoms you take with my friends, can have no other
tendency, but to weaken the sense of my duty to them, without answering
any good end to myself.

I cannot help owning, however, that I am pleased to have you join with
me in opinion of the contempt which Mr. Solmes deserves from me. But
yet, permit me to say, that he is not quite so horrible a creature a