“Dear Sir,
“Your servant duly delivered your kind letter, informing me, that my daughter Mrs. Philip De Lancaster was safely delivered of a son; an event, which I hope will afford much consolation to you, and be the happy means of delivering down to future generations a name, which from time immemorial has been highly respectable in these parts.
“To my name as one of the sponsors at the christening you have an undoubted right, and I am flattered that you enforce it; but of my personal attendance upon that solemnity there is I fear but little chance; for I am a victim to the gout, and though the snow, which now lies on the hills, may disappear before the month is out, I cannot expect my pains will be in the like melting mood: but He, who is the disposer of all things, will dispose even of such a wretched insignificant as I am.
“Alas! my good brother-in-law, I am not like you a healthy, gay and social man; I am gloomy, sullen and uncomfortable; hypochondriac by nature, and splenetic by vexation and disease: I will not say that I repent that ever I was a father; that would be wrong; but I do say, that, being a father, I repent of my unfitness, and am conscious of my errors.
“One only child, whom we jointly call our daughter, was all that Providence entrusted to me: her mother died when she was an infant, and I never ventured on a second marriage. I did not seek for teachers to instruct me how to educate my child: I took that task upon myself, and was her only master: I coveted not to accomplish her as a fine lady; I studied to implant good principles in her heart, and make her an honest, honourable woman. I suspect my discipline was too rigid, for I totally overlooked amusement, and fixed a melancholy upon her spirit, accompanied with so absolute a submission to my dictates, that she seemed to think and act without any will or option of her own.
“When you tendered to me your alliance, I embraced it with ardour; for I held your character then, as I do to this day, in the highest honour and respect. Had ambition been my ruling passion, I could have looked up to nothing in point of family of superior dignity; had avarice been my vice, how could I have gratified it more than by marrying my daughter to the only son and heir of De Lancaster? Your son was comely, courteous, unassuming, and though perhaps not prominently marked with any brilliant gleams of genius, yet certainly in moral purity no young man bore a more unblemished character. I recommended the connection to my daughter—warmly, anxiously recommended it—Implicitly, without appeal, in a concern the most material she accorded to my wish, and answered at the altar to the awful question there repeated as compliantly as she did, when I first proposed it to her.
“Now, sir, when I disclose to you that this too duteous creature had conceived a passion, which under the terror of my authority she had not courage to discover, judge what my sorrow and remorse must be. I have, though unintentionally, made a wreck of her peace, and endangered that of your son. I may have brought into your family a wife without a heart for her husband, and a mother, (which Heaven avert!) without natural affection for her offspring.
“Thus I have laid the sorrows of my soul before you, and beseech you, that, with the candour and benignity, which are natural to you, you would look upon my child, and without revealing my secret to your son, influence him to be mild with her, in her present situation more especially; and this I am confident will engage her gratitude, though I dare not promise if will gain her love.
“I was about to conclude with my love and blessing to the mother and her babe, but upon reading over what in the confusion of my thoughts I have so ill put together, I find I have omitted to tell you, who the young man is, of whom I have been speaking. His name is Jones, a gentleman by birth, but destitute of fortune. He was ensign, and on a recruiting party at Denbigh, where I noticed him for his modest manners and engaging person; having withal known his father Colonel Jones, and served with him in the same regiment when I was in the army, I invited this youth to make my house his quarters, became very fond of him, and furnished him with means to purchase a lieutenancy. I have nothing to charge him with; his conduct towards my daughter was honourable in the extreme, and I am informed that it was his punctilious delicacy towards me as his patron, that occasioned him to secede, when she probably would have summoned resolution to have laid the state of her heart before me; which had she done, if I know myself, I know she would have had her lover, and Jones would have had my estate.
I have the honour to be,
Dear Sir, &c. &c.
John Morgan.”