f; and indignation has taken place of it. And now it
shall be a point with me, to get him at a distance from me.

I am, my dearest friend, Your ever faithful and obliged CL. H.

LETTER XVI

MR. LOVELACE, TO JOHN BELFORD, ESQ. TUESDAY, APR. 13.

Why, Jack, thou needest not make such a wonderment, as the girls say, if
I should have taken large strides already towards reformation: for dost
thou not see, that while I have been so assiduously, night and day,
pursuing this single charmer, I have infinitely less to answer for,
than otherwise I should have had? Let me see, how many days and
nights?--Forty, I believe, after open trenches, spent in the sap only,
and never a mine sprung yet!

By a moderate computation, a dozen kites might have fallen, while I have
been only trying to ensnare this single lark. Nor yet do I see when
I shall be able to bring her to my lure: more innocent days yet,
therefore!--But reformation for my stalking-horse, I hope, will be a
sure, though a slow method to effect all my purposes.

Then, Jack, thou wilt have a merit too in engaging my pen, since thy
time would be otherwise worse employed: and, after all, who knows but by
creating new habits, at the expense of the old, a real reformation may
be brought about? I have promised it; and I believe there is a pleasure
to be found in being good, reversing that of Nat. Lee's madman,

--Which none but good men know.

By all this, seest thou not how greatly preferable it is, on twenty
accounts, to pursue a difficult rather than an easy chace? I have a
desire to inculcate this pleasure upon thee, and to teach thee to fly at
nobler game than daws, crows, and widgeons: I have a mind to shew thee
from time to time, in the course of the correspondence thou hast so
earnestly wished me to begin on this illustrious occasion, that these
exalted ladies may be abased, and to obviate one of the objections that
thou madest to me, when we were last together, that the pleasure which
attends these nobler aims, remunerates not the pains they bring with
them; since, like a paltry fellow as thou wert, thou assertedst that all
women are alike.

Thou knowest nothing, Jack, of the delicacies of intrigue: nothing of
the glory of outwitting the witty and the watchful: of the joys that
fill the mind of the inventive or contriving genius, ruminating which
to use of the different webs that offer to him for the entanglement of a
haughty charmer, who in her day