of
pleasures, which from our raised expectations must necessarily have
fallen miserably short of what we had promised ourselves at setting out.
Nothing but experience can give us a strong and efficacious conviction
of this difference: and when we would inculcate the fruits of that upon
the minds of those we love, who have not lived long enough to find those
fruits; and would hope, that our advice should have as much force upon
them, as experience has upon us; and which, perhaps, our parents' advice
had not upon ourselves, at our daughter' time of life; should we not
proceed by patient reasoning and gentleness, that we may not harden,
where we would convince? For, Madam, the tenderest and most generous
minds, when harshly treated, become generally the most inflexible. If
the young lady knows her heart to be right, however defective her
head may be for want of age and experience, she will be apt to be very
tenacious. And if she believes her friends to be wrong, although perhaps
they may be only so in their methods of treating her, how much will
every unkind circumstance on the parent's part, or heedless one on the
child's, though ever so slight in itself, widen the difference! The
parent's prejudice in disfavour, will confirm the daughter's in favour,
of the same person; and the best reasonings in the world on either side,
will be attributed to that prejudice. In short, neither of them will be
convinced: a perpetual opposition ensues: the parent grows impatient;
the child desperate: and, as a too natural consequence, that falls
out which the mother was most afraid of, and which possibly had not
happened, if the child's passions had been only led, not driven.'

My mother was pleased with the whole letter; and said, It deserved to
have the success it met with. But asked me what excuse could be offered
for a young lady capable of making such reflections (and who at her time
of life could so well assume the character of one of riper years) if she
should rush into any fatal mistake herself?

She then touched upon the moral character of Mr. Lovelace; and how
reasonable the aversion of your reflections is to a man who gives
himself the liberties he is said to take; and who indeed himself denies
not the accusation; having been heard to declare, that he will do all
the mischief he can to the sex, in revenge for the ill usage and
broken vows of his first love, at a time when he was too young [his own
expression it seems] to be ins