e my invective into panegyric all at once,
and so soon. We, or such as I at least, love to keep ourselves in
countenance for a rash judgment, even when we know it to be rash.
Everybody has not your generosity in confessing a mistake. It requires
a greatness of soul frankly to do it. So I made still further inquiry
after his life and manner, and behaviour there, in hopes to find
something bad: but all uniform!

Upon the whole, Mr. Lovelace comes out with so much advantage from this
inquiry, that were there the least room for it, I should suspect the
whole to be a plot set on foot to wash a blackamoor white. Adieu, my
dear.

ANNA HOWE.

LETTER XXIX

MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE, TO MISS HOWE SATURDAY, APRIL 1.

Hasty censures do indeed subject themselves to the charge of
variableness and inconsistency in judgment: and so they ought; for,
if you, even you, my dear, were so loth to own a mistake, as in the
instance before us you pretend you were, I believe I should not have
loved you so well as I really do love you. Nor could you, in that case,
have so frankly thrown the reflection I hint at upon yourself, have not
your mind been one of the most ingenuous that ever woman boasted.

Mr. Lovelace has faults enow to deserve very severe censure, although
he be not guilty of this. If I were upon such terms with him as he could
wish me to be, I should give him such a hint, that this treacherous
Joseph Leman cannot be so much attached to him, as perhaps he thinks
him to be. If it were, he would not have been so ready to report to his
disadvantage (and to Betty Barnes too) this slight affair of the pretty
rustic. Joseph has engaged Betty to secrecy; promising to let her, and
her young master, to know more, when he knows the whole of the matter:
and this hinders her from mentioning it, as she is nevertheless agog to
do, to my sister or brother. And then she does not choose to disoblige
Joseph; for although she pretends to look above him, she listens, I
believe, to some love-stories he tells her.

Women having it not in their power to begin a courtship, some of them
very frequently, I believe, lend an ear where their hearts incline not.

But to say no more of these low people, neither of whom I think
tolerably of; I must needs own, that as I should for ever have despised
this man, had he been capable of such a vile intrigue in his way to
Harlowe-place, and as I believe he was capable of it, it has indeed [I
own it has] prop