113.
To his Stepmother.
1771.
Dear Madam,
WARM DEFENCE OF HIS HONOUR.
I am much obliged to your friendship, for the advice you have given me with regard to my future conduct, and shall always pay the most sincere deference to it. Both prudence and inclination will engage me to get rid of the farm as soon as such a complicated piece of business can be transacted. With respect to my expences they shall always be proportioned to my income, and I am already preparing to discharge a cook, a groom, and other unnecessary Servants. There is one part of your letter which has given me, Dear Madam, very great uneasiness. You say that you have heard from undoubted authority that my own imprudences had so much embarrassed me, as to oblige me to make a concession which otherwise I might not have done. Were I conscious of these imprudencies, I should fairly acknowledge them, and endeavour by future behaviour to make some amends for past follies. But an innocent person has a right to speak a very different language. I know my own innocence, and without any vain protestations of it, I will at once come to such facts as must either establish it, or else expose me not only as a prodigal, but as a man devoid of honour and veracity. I therefore solemnly affirm the truth of the following facts.
1. When I returned from Switzerland about twelve years and a half ago, my father told me his affairs were a good deal embarrassed, and desired that I would joyn in cutting off the entail and in raising £10,000. I was then a raw lad of one and twenty, unacquainted with law or business, and desirous of obliging my father. He then gave me three hundred a year, a moderate allowance to which his eldest son would have had a natural claim, had no such transaction intervened.
2. Upon and within that allowance, I have constantly lived, except during two years and a half that I was abroad the second time. Whilst I was abroad I spent about seven hundred a year, a sum which, with the unavoidable expences of travelling, barely supports the appearance of an English gentleman.
3. I have never on any occasion received from my father any pecuniary inducements to consent to any step whatsoever, except once, four hundred pounds, near £100 of which were arrears of my allowances, and about the same sum I returned to my father when he wanted it very much.
4. I have never lost at play a hundred pounds at any one time; perhaps not in the course of my life. Play I neither love nor understand.
5. I have never taken up any money for myself, in any way whatever.
6. Neither at my father's death nor at any other period have I ever had any other debts than common tradesmen's bills, which are paid from one year to another, and even those to a very trifling amount.
I have tried to answer a general charge, as far as a general charge can be answered. But for our mutual satisfaction, let me intreat you, Dear Madam, to communicate that part of my letter to the persons from whom you received your intelligence. Desire that without sparing me they would contradict by facts any of those which I have advanced, or that they would mention any which I have suppressed. If they are unable to do this, your candour must allow that they were either weakly deceived, or wicked Deceivers. As I neither know nor wish to know who they are, Charity induces me to believe the former rather than to suspect the latter.
I think, Dear Madam, you will excuse my warmth. I should deserve the imputation could I submit to it with patience. As long as you credit it, you must view me in the light of a specious Hypocrite, who meanly cloaked his own extravagancies under his father's imprudence, and who ascribed to filial piety what had been the consequence of folly and necessity. As long as you credit it, I must be deprived of the esteem of a person, whose good opinion and friendship it will ever be my wish and study to deserve.