Clarissa Harlowe Samuel Richardson (most important books to read TXT) 📖

because fruitless! Let me wrap myself about in the mantle of my own integrity, and take comfort in my unfaulty intention! Since it is now too late to look back, let me collect all my fortitude, and endeavour to stand those shafts of angry Providence, which it will not permit me to shun! That, whatever the trials may be which I am destined to undergo, I may not behave unworthily in them, and may come out amended by them.

Join with me in this prayer, my beloved friend; for your own honour’s sake, as well as for love’s sake, join with me in it; lest a deviation on my side should, with the censorious, cast a shade upon a friendship which has no levity in it; and the basis of which is improvement, as well in the greater as lesser duties.

Cl. Harlowe.

Letter 146 Miss Clarissa Harlowe, to Miss Howe

Saturday Afternoon, April 22

O my best, my only friend! Now indeed is my heart broken! It has received a blow it never will recover. Think not of corresponding with a wretch who now seems absolutely devoted. How can it be otherwise, if a parent’s curses have the weight I always attributed to them, and have heard so many instances in confirmation of that weight!⁠—Yes, my dear Miss Howe, superadded to all my afflictions, I have the consequences of a father’s curse to struggle with! How shall I support this reflection!⁠—My past and my present situation so much authorizing my apprehensions!

I have, at last, a letter from my unrelenting sister. Would to Heaven I had not provoked it by my second letter to my aunt Hervey! It lay ready for me, it seems. The thunder slept, till I awakened it. I enclose the letter itself. Transcribe it I cannot. There is no bearing the thoughts of it: for (shocking reflection!) the curse extends to the life beyond this.

I am in the depth of vapourish despondency. I can only repeat⁠—shun, fly, correspond not with a wretch so devoted as

Cl. Harlowe.

Letter 147 To Miss Clarissa Harlowe

To be left at Mr. Osgood’s, near Soho-Square

Friday, April 21

It was expected you would send again to me, or to my aunt Hervey. The enclosed has lain ready for you, therefore, by direction. You will have no answer from anybody, write to whom you will, and as often as you will, and what you will.

It was designed to bring you back by proper authority, or to send you whither the disgraces you have brought upon us all should be in the likeliest way, after a while, to be forgotten. But I believe that design is over: so you may range securely⁠—nobody will think it worth while to give themselves any trouble about you. Yet my mother has obtained leave to send you your clothes of all sorts: but your clothes only. This is a favour you’ll see by the within letter not designed you: and now not granted for your sake, but because my poor mother cannot bear in her sight anything you used to wear. Read the enclosed, and tremble.

Arabella Harlowe.

To the Most Ungrateful and Undutiful of Daughters

Harlowe-place, April 15.

Sister That Was!

For I know not what name you are permitted, or choose to go by.

You have filled us all with distraction. My father, in the first agitations of his mind, on discovering your wicked, your shameful elopement, imprecated on his knees a fearful curse upon you. Tremble at the recital of it!⁠—No less, than “that you may meet your punishment both here and hereafter, by means of the very wretch in whom you have chosen to place your wicked confidence.”

Your clothes will not be sent you. You seem, by leaving them behind you, to have been secure of them, whenever you demanded them, but perhaps you could think of nothing but meeting your fellow:⁠—nothing but how to get off your forward self!⁠—For everything seems to have been forgotten but what was to contribute to your wicked flight.⁠—Yet you judged right, perhaps, that you would have been detected had you endeavoured to get away with your clothes.⁠—Cunning creature! not to make one step that we would guess at you by! Cunning to effect your own ruin, and the disgrace of all the family!

But does the wretch put you upon writing for your things, for fear you should be too expensive to him?⁠—That’s it, I suppose.

Was there ever a giddier creature?⁠—Yet this is the celebrated, the blazing Clarissa⁠—Clarissa what? Harlowe, no doubt!⁠—And Harlowe it will be, to the disgrace of us all!

Your drawings and your pieces are all taken down; as is also your whole-length picture, in the Vandyke taste, from your late parlour: they are taken down, and thrown into your closet, which will be nailed up, as if it were not a part of the house, there to perish together: For who can bear to see them? Yet, how did they use to be shown to everybody: the former, for the magnifying of your dainty finger-works; the latter, for the imputed dignity (dignity now in the dust!) of your boasted figure; and this by those fond parents from whom you have run away with so much, yet with so little contrivance!

My brother vows revenge upon your libertine⁠—for the family’s sake he vows it⁠—not for yours!⁠—for he will treat you, he declares, like a common creature, if ever he sees you: and doubts not that this will be your fate.

My uncle Harlowe renounces you forever.

So does my uncle Antony.

So does my aunt Hervey.

So do I, base, unworthy creature! the disgrace of a good family, and the property of an infamous rake, as questionless you will soon find yourself, if you are not already.

Your books, since they have not taught you what belongs to your family, to your sex, and to your education, will not be sent to you. Your money neither. Nor