st her, I encouraged myself
that I abused no confidence; for none had she in my honour.

'The evils she has suffered, it would have been more than a miracle had
she avoided. Her watchfulness rendered more plots abortive than those
which contributed to her fall; and they were many and various. And all
her greater trials and hardships were owing to her noble resistance and
just resentment.

'I know, proceeded I, how much I condemn myself in the justice I am doing
to this excellent creature. But yet I will do her justice, and cannot
help it if I would. And I hope this shows that I am not so totally
abandoned as I have been thought to be.

'Indeed, with me, she has done more honour to her sex in her fall, if it
be to be called a fall, (in truth it ought not,) than ever any other
could do in her standing.

'When, at length, I had given her watchful virtue cause of suspicion, I
was then indeed obliged to make use of power and art to prevent her
escaping from me. She then formed contrivances to elude mine; but all
her's were such as strict truth and punctilious honour would justify.
She could not stoop to deceit and falsehood, no, not to save herself.
More than once justly did she tell me, fired by conscious worthiness,
that her soul was my soul's superior!--Forgive me, Ladies, for saying,
that till I knew her, I questioned a soul in a sex, created, as I was
willing to suppose, only for temporary purposes.--It is not to be
imagined into what absurdities men of free principle run in order to
justify to themselves their free practices; and to make a religion to
their minds: and yet, in this respect, I have not been so faulty as some
others.

'No wonder that such a noble creature as this looked upon every studied
artifice as a degree of baseness not to be forgiven: no wonder that she
could so easily become averse to the man (though once she beheld him with
an eye not wholly indifferent) whom she thought capable of premeditated
guilt. Nor, give me leave, on the other hand, to say, is it to be
wondered at, that the man who found it so difficult to be forgiven for
the slighter offences, and who had not the grace to recede or repent,
(made desperate,) should be hurried on to the commission of the greater.

'In short, Ladies, in a word, my Lord, Miss Clarissa Harlowe is an angel;
if ever there was or could be one in human nature: and is, and ever was,
as pure as an angel in her will: and this justice I must do her, althoug