nsideration. This satisfaction, I am persuaded every one, in the long
run, will enjoy, who has the virtue to withstand, or prevent, a wicked
purpose. I was obliged, I see, to your kind wishes--but it was a point
of honour with you to keep his secret; the more indispensable with you,
perhaps, the viler the secret. Yet permit me to wish, Mr. Belford, that
you were capable of relishing the pleasures that arise to a benevolent
mind from VIRTUOUS friendship!--none other is worthy of the sacred name.
You seem an humane man: I hope, for your own sake, you will one day
experience the difference: and, when you do, think of Miss Howe and
Clarissa Harlowe, (I find you know much of my sad story,) who were the
happiest creatures on earth in each other's friendship till this friend
of your's'--And there she stopt, and turned from me.

Where thou callest thyself a villanous plotter; 'To take a crime to
himself, said she, without shame, O what a hardened wretch is this man!'

On that passage, where thou sayest, Let me know how she has been treated:
if roughly, woe be to the guilty! this was her remark, with an air of
indignation: 'What a man is your friend, Sir!--Is such a one as he to set
himself up to punish the guilty?--All the rough usage I could receive
from them, was infinitely less'--And there she stopt a moment or two:
then proceeding--'And who shall punish him? what an assuming wretch!--
Nobody but himself is entitled to injure the innocent;--he is, I suppose,
on the earth, to act the part which the malignant fiend is supposed to
act below--dealing out punishments, at his pleasure, to every inferior
instrument of mischief!'

What, thought I, have I been doing! I shall have this savage fellow
think I have been playing him booty, in reading part of his letter to
this sagacious lady!--Yet, if thou art angry, it can only, in reason,
be at thyself; for who would think I might not communicate to her some
of thy sincerity in exculpating thyself from a criminal charge, which
thou wrotest to thy friend, to convince him of thy innocence? But a bad
heart, and a bad cause are confounded things: and so let us put it to its
proper account.

I passed over thy charge to me, to curse them by the hour; and thy names
of dragon and serpents, though so applicable; since, had I read them,
thou must have been supposed to know from the first what creatures they
were; vile fellow as thou wert, for bringing so much purity among them!
And I clos