And am I then, [with a kind of frantic wildness,] to be detained a prisoner in this horrid house—­am I, Sir?—­Take care! take care! holding up her hand, menacing, how you make me desperate!  If I fall, though by my own hand, inquisition will be made for my blood; and be not out in thy plot, Lovelace, if it should be so—­make sure work, I charge thee—­dig a hole deep enough to cram in and conceal this unhappy body; for, depend upon it, that some of those who will not stir to protect me living, will move heaven and earth to avenge me dead!

A horrid dear creature!—­By my soul she made me shudder!  She had need indeed to talk of her unhappiness in falling into the hands of the only man in the world, who could have used her as I have used her—­she is the only woman in the world, who could have shocked and disturbed me as she has done.  So we are upon a foot in that respect.  And I think I have the worst of it by much:  since very little has been my joy—­very much my trouble.  And her punishment, as she calls it, is over:  but when mine will, or what it may be, who can tell?

Here, only recapitulating, (think, then, how I must be affected at the time,) I was forced to leave off, and sing a song to myself.  I aimed at a lively air; but I croaked rather than sung.  And fell into the old dismal thirtieth of January strain; I hemmed up for a sprightlier note; but it would not do; and at last I ended, like a malefactor, in a dead psalm melody.

Heigh-ho!—­I gape like an unfledged kite in its nest, wanting to swallow a chicken, bobbed at its mouth by its marauding dam!—­

What a-devil ails me?—­I can neither think nor write!

Lie down, pen, for a moment!

LETTER XXII

Mr. Lovelace, to John Belford, ESQ.

There is certainly a good deal in the observation, that it costs a man ten times more pains to be wicked, than it would cost him to be good.  What a confounded number of contrivances have I had recourse to, in order to carry my point with this charming creature; and yet after all, how have I puzzled myself by it; and yet am near tumbling into the pit which it was the end of all my plots to shun!  What a happy man had I been with such an excellence, could I have brought my mind to marry when I first prevailed upon her to quit her father’s house!  But then, as I have often reflected, how had I known, that a but blossoming beauty, who could carry on a private correspondence, and run such risques with a notorious wild fellow, was not prompted by inclination, which one day might give such a free-liver as myself as much pain to reflect upon, as, at the time it gave me pleasure?  Thou rememberest the host’s tale in Ariosto.  And thy experience, as well as mine, can furnish out twenty Fiametta’s in proof of the imbecility of the sex.

But to proceed with my narrative.