this is your case too in your domestic life, and I sometimes think of your old housekeeper as my nurse, though I tremble at the sea, which only divides us.  As your fears are not so great as mine, and I firmly hope your strength still much greater, is it utterly impossible it might once more be some pleasure to you to see England?  My sole motive in proposing France to meet in, was the narrowness of the passage by sea from hence, the physicians having told me the weakness of my breast, &c., is such, as a sea-sickness might endanger my life.  Though one or two of our friends are gone since you saw your native country, there remain a few more who will last so till death; and who I cannot but hope have an attractive power to draw you back to a country which cannot quite be sunk or enslaved, while such spirits remain.  And let me tell you, there are a few more of the same spirit, who would awaken all your old ideas, and revive your hopes of her future recovery and virtue.  These look up to you with reverence, and would be animated by the sight of him at whose soul they have taken fire in his writings, and derived from thence as much love of their species as is consistent with a contempt for the knaves in it.

I could never be weary, except at the eyes, of writing to you; but my real reason (and a strong one it is) for doing it so seldom, is fear; fear of a very great and experienced evil, that of my letters being kept by the partiality of friends, and passing into the hands and malice of enemies, who publish them with all their imperfections on their head, so that I write not on the common terms of honest men.

Would to God you would come over with Lord Orrery, whose care of you in the voyage I could so certainly depend on; and bring with you your old housekeeper and two or three servants.  I have room for all, a heart for all, and (think what you will) a fortune for all.  We could, were we together, contrive to make our last days easy, and leave some sort of monument, what friends two wits could be in spite of all the fools in the world.  Adieu.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

1689-1761

TO MISS MULSO

A discussion on love

3 Sept. 1751.

In another place, you are offended with the word gratitude; as if your idea of love excluded gratitude.

And further on, you are offended that I call this same passion ’a little selfish passion’.

And you say that you have known few girls, and still fewer men, whom you have thought ‘capable of being in love’.

‘By this’, proceed you, ’you will see that my ideas of the word love are different from yours, when you call it a little selfish passion.’

Now, madam, if that passion is not little and selfish that makes two vehement souls prefer the gratification of each other, often to a sense of duty, and always to the whole world without them, be pleased to tell me what is?  And pray be so good as to define to me what the noble passion is, of which so few people of either sex are capable.  Give me your ideas of it.