I just now understand that your sister will, by proper authority, propose
this prosecution to you. I humbly presume that the reason why you
resolved not upon this step from the first, was, that you did not
know that it would have the countenance and support of your
relations.

[ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]

LETTER XXV

MISS CL. HARLOWE, TO THE REV. DR. LEWEN SAT. AUG. 19.

REVEREND AND DEAR SIR,

I thought, till I received your affectionate and welcome letter, that I had neither father, uncle, brother left; nor hardly a friend among my former favourers of your sex. Yet, knowing you so well, and having no reason to upbraid myself with a faulty will, I was to blame, (even although I had doubted the continuance of your good opinion,) to decline the trial whether I had forfeited it or not; and if I had, whether I could not honourably reinstate myself in it.

But, Sir, it was owing to different causes that I did not; partly to shame, to think how high, in my happier days, I stood in your esteem, and how much I must be sunk in it, since those so much nearer in relation to me gave me up; partly to deep distress, which makes the humbled heart diffident; and made mine afraid to claim the kindred mind in your's, which would have supplied to me in some measure all the dear and lost relations I have named.

Then, so loth, as I sometimes was, to be thought to want to make a party against those whom both duty and inclination bid me reverence: so long trailed on between hope and doubt: so little my own mistress at one time; so fearful of making or causing mischief at another; and not being encouraged to hope, by your kind notice, that my application to you would be acceptable:—apprehending that my relations had engaged your silence at least*—THESE—But why these unavailing retrospections now?—I was to be unhappy—in order to be happy; that is my hope!—Resigning therefore to that hope, I will, without any further preamble, write a few lines, (if writing to you, I can write but a few,) in answer to the subject of your kind letter.

* The stiff visit this good divine was prevailed upon to make her, as mentioned in Vol. II. Letter XXXI. (of which, however, she was too generous to remind him) might warrant the lady to think that he had rather inclined to their party, as to the parental side, than to her's.

Permit me, then, to say, That I believe your arguments would have been unanswerable in almost every other case of this nature, but in that of the unhappy Clarissa Harlowe.