ormance of the will of the defunct is the
question--no more to be dispensed with by you, in whose favour it was
made, than by any body else who have only themselves in view by breaking
through it.

I know how much you despise riches in the main: but yet it behoves
you to remember, that in one instance you yourself have judged them
valuable--'In that they put it into our power to lay obligations; while
the want of that power puts a person under a necessity of receiving
favours--receiving them perhaps from grudging and narrow spirits, who
know not how to confer them with that grace, which gives the principal
merit to a beneficent action.'--Reflect upon this, my dear, and see how
it agrees with the declaration you have made to your aunt and sister,
that you would not resume your estate, were you to be turned out of
doors, and reduced to indigence and want. Their very fears that you will
resume, point out to you the necessity of resuming upon the treatment
you meet with.

I own, that (at first reading) I was much affected with your mother's
letter sent with the patterns. A strange measure however from a mother;
for she did not intend to insult you; and I cannot but lament that so
sensible and so fine a woman should stoop to so much art as that letter
is written with: and which also appears in some of the conversations
you have given me an account of. See you not in her passiveness, what
boisterous spirits can obtain from gentler, merely by teasing and
ill-nature?

I know the pride they have always taken in calling you a
Harlowe--Clarissa Harlowe, so formal and so set, at every word,
when they are grave or proudly solemn.--Your mother has learnt it of
them--and as in marriage, so in will, has been taught to bury her own
superior name and family in theirs. I have often thought that the same
spirit governed them, in this piece of affectation, and others of
the like nature (as Harlowe-Place, and so-forth, though not the elder
brother's or paternal seat), as governed the tyrant Tudor,* who marrying
Elizabeth, the heiress of the house of York, made himself a title to
a throne, which he would not otherwise have had (being but a base
descendant of the Lancaster line); and proved a gloomy and vile
husband to her; for no other cause, than because she had laid him under
obligations which his pride would not permit him to own.--Nor would the
unprincely wretch marry her till he was in possession of the crown, that
he might not be su