Had I owned that I was overreached, and forced away against my intention, might they not, as a proof of the truth of my assertion, have insisted upon my immediate return to them? And, if I did not return, would they not have reason to suppose, that I had now altered my mind (if such were my mind) or had not the power to return?—Then were I to have gone back, must it not have been upon their own terms? No conditioning with a father! is a maxim with my father, and with my uncles. If I would have gone, Mr. Lovelace would have opposed it. So I must have been under his controul, or have run away from him, as it is supposed I did to him, from Harlowe-place. In what a giddy light would this have made me appear!—Had he constrained me, could I have appealed to my friends for their protection, without risking the very consequences, to prevent which (setting up myself presumptuously, as a middle person between flaming spirits,) I have run into such terrible inconveniencies.
But, after all, must it not give me great anguish of mind, to be forced to sanctify, as I may say, by my seeming after-approbation, a measure I was so artfully tricked into, and which I was so much resolved not to take?
How one evil brings on another, is sorrowfully witnessed to by
Your ever-obliged and affectionate, CL. HARLOWE.
LETTER XXV
MR. LOVELACE, TO JOHN BELFORD, ESQ. FRIDAY, APR. 14.
Thou hast often reproached me, Jack, with my vanity, without distinguishing the humourous turn that accompanies it; and for which, at the same time that thou robbest me of the merit of it thou admirest me highly. Envy gives thee the indistinction: Nature inspires the admiration: unknown to thyself it inspires it. But thou art too clumsy and too short-sighted a mortal, to know how to account even for the impulses by which thou thyself art moved.
Well, but this acquits thee not of my charge of vanity, Lovelace, methinks thou sayest.
And true thou sayest: for I have indeed a confounded parcel of it. But, if men of parts may not be allowed to be in vain, who should! and yet, upon second thoughts, men of parts have the least occasion of any to be vain; since the world (so few of them are there in it) are ready to find them out, and extol them. If a fool can be made sensible that there is a man who has more understanding than himself, he is ready enough to conclude, that such a man must be a very extraordinary creature.