MISS CL. HARLOWE, TO LADY BETTY LAWRANCE THURSDAY, JUNE 29.
MADAM,
I hope you'll excuse the freedom of this address, from one who has not the honour to be personally known to you, although you must have heard much of Clarissa Harlowe. It is only to beg the favour of a line from your Ladyship's hand, (by the next post, if convenient,) in answer to the following questions:
1. Whether you wrote a letter, dated, as I have a memorandum, Wedn. June
7, congratulating your nephew Lovelace on his supposed nuptials, as
reported to you by Mr. Spurrier, your Ladyship's steward, as from one
Captain Tomlinson:—and in it reproaching Mr. Lovelace, as guilty of
slight, &c. in not having acquainted your Ladyship and the family
with his marriage?
2. Whether your ladyship wrote to Miss Montague to meet you at Reading,
in order to attend you to your cousin Leeson's, in Albemarle-street;
on your being obliged to be in town on your old chancery affair, I
remember are the words? and whether you bespoke your nephew's
attendance there on Sunday night the 11th?
3. Whether your Ladyship and Miss Montague did come to town at that
time; and whether you went to Hampstead, on Monday, in a hired coach
and four, your own being repairing, and took from thence to town with
the young creature whom you visited there?
Your Ladyship will probably guess, that the questions are not asked for reasons favourable to your nephew Lovelace. But be the answer what it will, it can do him no hurt, nor me any good; only that I think I owe it to my former hopes, (however deceived in them,) and even to charity, that a person, of whom I was once willing to think better, should not prove so egregiously abandoned, as to be wanting, in every instance, to that veracity which is indispensable in the character of a gentleman.
Be pleased, Madam, to direct to me, (keeping the direction a secret for the present,) to be left at the Belle-Savage, on Ludgate hill, till called for. I am
Your Ladyship's most humble servant, CLARISSA HARLOWE.