rse round; getting sons and daughters; providing nurses for them
first, governors and governesses next; teaching them lessons their
fathers never practised, nor which their mother, as her parents will say,
was much the better for! And at last, perhaps, when life shall be turned
into the dully sober stillness, and I become desirous to forget all my
past rogueries, what comfortable reflections will it afford to find them
all revived, with equal, or probably greater trouble and expense, in the
persons and manners of so many young Lovelaces of the boys; and to have
the girls run away with varlets, perhaps not half so ingenious as myself;
clumsy fellows, as it might happen, who could not afford the baggages one
excuse for their weakness, besides those disgraceful ones of sex and
nature!--O Belford! who can bear to think of these things!----Who, at my
time of life especially, and with such a bias for mischief!

* See Letter XVIII. of this volume.

Of this I am absolutely convinced, that if a man ever intends to marry,
and to enjoy in peace his own reflections, and not be afraid
retribution, or of the consequences of his own example, he should never
be a rake.

This looks like conscience; don't it, Belford?

But, being in earnest still, as I have said, all I have to do in my
present uncertainty, is, to brighten up my faculties, by filing off the
rust they have contracted by the town smoke, a long imprisonment in my
close attendance to so little purpose on my fair perverse; and to brace
up, if I can, the relaxed fibres of my mind, which have been twitched and
convulsed like the nerves of some tottering paralytic, by means of the
tumults she has excited in it; that so I may be able to present to her a
husband as worthy as I can be of her acceptance; or, if she reject me, be
in a capacity to resume my usual gaiety of heart, and show others of the
misleading sex, that I am not discouraged, by the difficulties I have met
with from this sweet individual of it, from endeavouring to make myself
as acceptable to them as before.

In this latter case, one tour to France and Italy, I dare say, will do
the business. Miss Harlowe will by that time have forgotten all she has
suffered from her ungrateful Lovelace: though it will be impossible that
her Lovelace should ever forget a woman, whose equal he despairs to meet
with, were he to travel from one end of the world to the other.

If thou continuest paying off the heavy debts my