ime to relieve you.

Adieu, my best beloved and kindest friend! Pray for your CLARISSA.

LETTER LVIII

MISS HOWE, TO MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE THURSDAY, APRIL 27.

I am sorry you sent back my Norris. But you must be allowed to do as you
please. So must I, in my turn. We must neither of us, perhaps, expect
absolutely of the other what is the rightest thing to be done: and
yet few folks, so young as we are, better know what the rightest is. I
cannot separate myself from you; although I give a double instance of my
vanity in joining myself with you in this particular assertion.

I am most heartily rejoiced that your prospects are so much mended; and
that, as I hoped, good has been produced out of evil. What must the man
have been, what must have been his views, had he not taken such a
turn, upon a letter so vile, and upon a treatment so unnatural, himself
principally the occasion of it?

You know best your motives for suspending: but I wish you could have
taken him at offers so earnest.* Why should you not have permitted him
to send for Lord M.'s chaplain? If punctilio only was in the way, and
want of a license, and of proper preparations, and such like, my service
to you, my dear: and there is ceremony tantamount to your ceremony.

* Mr. Lovelace, in his next Letter, tells his friend how extremely ill
the Lady was, recovering from fits to fall into stronger fits, and
nobody expecting her life. She had not, he says, acquainted Miss Howe
how very ill she was.--In the next Letter, she tells Miss Howe, that her
motives for suspending were not merely ceremonious ones.

Do not, do not, my dear friend, again be so very melancholy a decliner
as to prefer a shroud, when the matter you wish for is in your power;
and when, as you have justly said heretofore, persons cannot die when
they will.

But it is a strange perverseness in human nature that we slight that
when near us which at a distance we wish for.

You have now but one point to pursue: that is marriage: let that be
solemnized. Leave the rest to Providence, and, to use your own words in
a former letter, follow as that leads. You will have a handsome man,
a genteel man; he would be a wise man, if he were not vain of his
endowments, and wild and intriguing: but while the eyes of many of our
sex, taken by so specious a form and so brilliant a spirit, encourage
that vanity, you must be contented to stay till grey hairs and prudence
enter upon the stage to