old
me, how often I had thrown cold water upon the most charming flame that
ever warmed a lady's bosom, while but young and rising.

I required a definition of this right sort of love, he tried at it: but
made a sorry hand of it: nor could I, for the soul of me, be convinced,
that what he meant to extol was LOVE.

Upon the whole, we had a noble controversy upon this subject, in which
he insisted upon the unprecedented merit of the lady. Nevertheless I got
the better of him; for he was struck absolutely dumb, when (waving her
present perverseness, which yet was a sufficient answer to all his pleas)
I asserted, and offered to prove it, by a thousand instances impromptu,
that love was not governed by merit, nor could be under the dominion of
prudence, or any other reasoning power: and if the lady were capable of
love, it was of such a sort as he had nothing to do with, and which never
before reigned in a female heart.

I asked him, what he thought of her flight from me, at a time when I was
more than half overcome by the right sort of love he talked of?--And then
I showed him the letter she wrote, and left behind her for me, with an
intention, no doubt, absolutely to break my heart, or to provoke me to
hang, drown, or shoot myself; to say nothing of a multitude of
declarations from her, defying his power, and imputing all that looked
like love in her behaviour to me, to the persecution and rejection of her
friends; which made her think of me but as a last resort.

LOVE then gave her up. The letter, he said, deserved neither pardon nor
excuse. He did not think he had been pleading for such a declared rebel.
And as to the rest, he should be a betrayer of the rights of his own
sovereignty, if what I had alleged were true, and he were still to plead
for her.

I swore to the truth of all. And truly I swore: which perhaps I do not
always do.

And now what thinkest thou must become of the lady, whom LOVE itself
gives up, and CONSCIENCE cannot plead for?

LETTER V

MR. LOVELACE, TO JOHN BELFORD, ESQ.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON.

O Belford! what a hair's-breadth escape have I had!--Such a one, that I
tremble between terror and joy, at the thought of what might have
happened, and did not.

What a perverse girl is this, to contend with her fate; yet has reason
to think, that her very stars fight against her! I am the luckiest of
me!--But my breath almost fails me, when I reflect upon what a slender
thread my destiny hu