of your present
laudable delights you would choose to give up! which of his culpable ones
to follow him in! How could you brook to go backward, instead of
forward, in those duties which you now so exemplarily perform? and how do
you know, if you once give way, where you shall be suffered, where you
shall be able, to stop?

Your brother acknowledges that Mr. Solmes is not near so agreeable in
person as Mr. Lovelace. But what is person with such a lady as I have
the honour to be now writing to? He owns likewise that he has not the
address of Mr. Lovelace: but what a mere personal advantage is a
plausible address, without morals? A woman had better take a husband
whose manners she were to fashion, than to find them ready-fashioned to
her hand, at the price of her morality; a price that is often paid for
travelling accomplishments. O my dear cousin, were you but with us here
at Florence, or at Rome, or at Paris, (where also I resided for many
months,) to see the gentlemen whose supposed rough English manners at
setting out are to be polished, and what their improvement are in their
return through the same places, you would infinitely prefer the man in
his first stage to the same man in his last. You find the difference on
their return--a fondness for foreign fashions, an attachment to foreign
vices, a supercilious contempt of his own country and countrymen;
(himself more despicable than the most despicable of those he despises;)
these, with an unblushing effrontery, are too generally the attainments
that concur to finish the travelled gentleman!

Mr. Lovelace, I know, deserves to have an exception made in his favour;
for he really is a man of parts and learning: he was esteemed so both
here and at Rome; and a fine person, and a generous turn of mind, gave
him great advantages. But you need not be told, that a libertine of weak
parts is able to do. And this I will tell you further, that it was Mr.
Lovelace's own fault that he was not still more respected than he was
among the literati here. There were, in short, some liberties in which
he indulged himself, that endangered his person and his liberty; and made
the best and most worthy of those who honoured him with their notice give
him up, and his stay both at Florence and at Rome shorter than he
designed.

This is all I choose to say of Mr. Lovelace. I had much rather have had
reason to give him a quite contrary character. But as to rakes or
libertines in gene