friends, proud myself of their pride, and glorying in my standing. Who
knows what the justice of Heaven may inflict, in order to convince us,
that we are not out of the reach of misfortune; and to reduce us to a
better reliance, than what we have hitherto presumptuously made?

I should have been very little the better for the conversation-visits
with the good Dr. Lewen used to honour me with, and for the principles
wrought (as I may say) into my earliest mind by my pious Mrs. Norton,
founded on her reverend father's experience, as well as on her own, if
I could not thus retrospect and argue, in such a strange situation as we
are in. Strange, I may well call it; for don't you see, my dear, that we
seem all to be impelled, as it were, by a perverse fate, which none of
us are able to resist?--and yet all arising (with a strong appearance
of self-punishment) from ourselves? Do not my parents see the hopeful
children, from whom they expected a perpetuity of worldly happiness
to their branching family, now grown up to answer the till now distant
hope, setting their angry faces against each other, pulling up by the
roots, as I may say, that hope which was ready to be carried into a
probable certainty?

Your partial love will be ready to acquit me of capital and intentional
faults:--but oh, my dear! my calamities have humbled me enough to make
me turn my gaudy eye inward; to make me look into myself.--And what have
I discovered there?--Why, my dear friend, more secret pride and vanity
than I could have thought had lain in my unexamined heart.

If I am to be singled out to be the punisher of myself and family, who
so lately was the pride of it, pray for me, my dear, that I may not
be left wholly to myself; and that I may be enabled to support my
character, so as to be justly acquitted of wilful and premeditated
faults. The will of Providence be resigned to in the rest: as that
leads, let me patiently and unrepiningly follow!--I shall not live
always!--May but my closing scene be happy!

But I will not oppress you, my dearest friend, with further reflections
of this sort. I will take them all into myself. Surely I have a mind
that has room for them. My afflictions are too sharp to last long. The
crisis is at hand. Happier times you bid me hope for. I will hope.

*****

But yet, I cannot be but impatient at times, to find myself thus driven,
and my character so depreciated and sunk, that were all the future to be
happy,