LETTER XLV COLONEL MORDEN, TO JOHN BELFORD, ESQ. SATURDAY, SEPT. 23.
DEAR SIR,
I am very sorry that any thing you have heard I have said should give you uneasiness.
I am obliged to you for the letters you have communicated to me; and still further for your promise to favour me with others occasionally.
All that relates to my dear cousin I shall be glad to see, be it from whom it will.
I leave to your own discretion, what may or may not be proper for Miss Howe to see from a pen so free as mine.
I admire her spirit. Were she a man, do you think, Sir, she, at this time, would have your advice to take upon such a subject as that upon which you write?
Fear not, however, that your communications shall put me upon any measures that otherwise I should not have taken. The wickedness, Sir, is of such a nature, as admits not of aggravation.
Yet I do assure you, that I have not made any resolutions that will be a tie upon me.
I have indeed expressed myself with vehemence upon the occasion. Who could forbear to do so? But it is not my way to resolve in matters of moment, till opportunity brings the execution of my purposes within my reach. We shall see by what manner of spirit this young man will be actuated on his recovery. If he continue to brave and defy a family, which he has so irreparably injured--if--but resolutions depending upon future contingencies are best left to future determination, as I just now hinted.
Mean time, I will own that I think my cousin's arguments unanswerable. No good man but must be influenced by them.--But, alas! Sir, who is good?
As to your arguments; I hope you will believe me, when I assure you, as I now do, that your opinion and your reasonings have, and will always have, great and deserved weight with me; and that I respect you still more than I did, if possible, for your expostulations in support of my cousin's pious injunctions to me. They come from you, Sir, with the greatest propriety, as her executor and representative; and likewise as you are a man of humanity, and a well-wisher to both parties.
I am not exempt from violent passions, Sir, any more than your friend; but then I hope they are only capable of being raised by other people's insolence, and not by my own arrogance. If ever I am stimulated by my imperfections and my resentments to act against my judgment and my cousin's injunctions, some such reflections as these that follow will run away with my reason. Indeed they are always present with me.
In the first place; my own disappointment: who came over with the hope of passing the remainder of my days in the conversation of a kinswoman so beloved; and to whom I have a double relation as her cousin and trustee.
Then I reflect, too, too often perhaps for my engagements to her in her last hours, that the dear creature could only forgive for herself. She, no doubt, is happy: but who shall forgive for a whole family, in all its branches made miserable for their lives?
That the more faulty her friends were as to her, the more enormous his ingratitude, and the more inexcusable--What! Sir, was it not enough that she suffered what she did for him, but the barbarian must make her suffer for her sufferings for his sake?--Passion makes me express this weakly; passion refuses the aid of expression sometimes, where the propriety of a resentment prima facie declares expression to be needless. I leave it to you, Sir, to give this reflection its due force.