The History of Emily Montague Part 71

I have seen more of the world than most men of my age, and I have seen the advantages of affluence in their strongest light.

I think a worthy man not only may have, but ought to have, an attention to making his way in the world, and improving his situation in it, by every means consistent with probity and honor, and with his own real happiness.

I have ever had this attention, and ever will, but not by base means: and, in my opinion, the very basest is that of selling one's hand in marriage.

With what horror do we regard a man who is kept! and a man who marries from interested views alone, is kept in the strongest sense of the word.

He is equally a purchased slave, with no distinction but that his bondage is of longer continuance.

Adieu! I may possibly write again on Wednesday.

Your faithful Ed. Rivers.

LETTER 218.

To Colonel Rivers, Bellfield, Rutland.

London, Nov. 18.

Fitzgerald is busy, and begs me to write to you.

Your cottagers are arrived; there is something very interesting in Miss Williams, and the little boy is an infant Adonis.

Heaven send he may be an honester man than his father, or I foresee terrible devastations amongst the s.e.x.

We have this moment your letter; I am angry with you for blaspheming the sweet season of nineteen:

"O lovely source Of generous foibles, youth! when opening minds Are honest as the light, lucid as air, As fostering breezes kind, as linnets gay, Tender as buds, and lavish as the spring."

You will find out I am in a course of Shenstone, which I prescribe to all minds tinctured with the uncomfortable selfishness of the present age.

The only way to be good, is to retain the generous mistakes, if they are such, of nineteen through life.

As to you, my dear Rivers, with all your airs of prudence and knowing the world, you are, in this respect, as much a boy as ever.

Witness your extreme joy at having married a woman with two thousand pounds, when you might have had one with twenty times the sum.

You are a boy, Rivers, I am a girl; and I hope we shall remain so as long as we live.

Do you know, my dear friend, that I am a daughter of the Muses, and that I wrote pastorals at seven years old?

I am charmed with this, because an old physician once told me it was a symptom, not only of long life, but of long youth, which is much better.

He explained this, by saying something about animal spirits, which I do not at all understand, but which perhaps you may.

I should have been a pretty enough kind of a poetess, if papa had not attempted to teach me how to be one, and insisted on seeing my scribbles as I went on: these same Muses are such bashful misses, they won't bear to be looked at.

Genius is like the sensitive plant; it shrinks from the touch.

So your nabob cousin is arrived: I hope he will fall in love with Emily; and remember, if he had obligations to Mrs. Rivers's father, he had exactly the same to your grandfather.

He might spare ten thousand pounds very well, which would improve your _pet.i.ts soupers_.

Adieu! Sir William Verville dines here, and I have but just time to dress.

Yours, A. Fitzgerald.

LETTER 219.

To Captain Fitzgerald.

Bellfield, Nov. 17, Morning.

I have had a letter from Colonel Willmott myself to-day; he is still quite unacquainted with the state of our domestic affairs; supposes me a batchelor, and talks of my being his son-in-law as a certainty, not attending to the probability of my having other engagements.

His history, which he tells me in this letter, is a very romantic one. He was a younger brother, and provided for accordingly: he loved, when about twenty, a lady who was as little a favorite of fortune as himself: their families, who on both sides had other views, joined their interest to get him sent to the East Indies; and the young lady was removed to the house of a friend in London, where she was to continue till he had left England.

Before he went, however, they contrived to meet, and were privately married; the marriage was known only to her brother, who was Willmott's friend.

He left her in the care of her brother, who, under pretence of diverting her melancholy, and endeavoring to cure her pa.s.sion, obtained leave of his father to take her with him to France.

She was there delivered of this child, and expired a few days after.

Her brother, without letting her family know the secret, educated the infant, as the daughter of a younger brother who had been just before killed in a duel in France; her parents, who died in a few years, were, almost in their last moments, informed of these circ.u.mstances, and made a small provision for the child.

In the mean time, Colonel Willmott, after experiencing a great variety of misfortunes for many years, during which he maintained a constant correspondence with his brother-in-law, and with no other person in Europe, by a train of lucky accidents, acquired very rapidly a considerable fortune, with which he resolved to return to England, and marry his daughter to me, as the only method to discharge fully his obligations to my grandfather, who alone, of all his family, had given him the least a.s.sistance when he left England. He wrote to his daughter, letting her know his design, and directing her to meet him in London; but she is not yet arrived.

Six in the evening.

My mother and Emily went to Temple's to dinner; they are to dress there, and I am to be surprized.

Seven.

Colonel Willmott is come: he is an extreme handsome man; tall, well-made, with an air of dignity which one seldom sees; he is very brown, and, what will please Bell, has an aquiline nose: he looks about fifty, but is not so much; change of climate has almost always the disagreable effect of adding some years to the look.

He is dressing, to accompany me to the masquerade; I must attend him: I have only time to say,

I am yours, Ed. Rivers.

LETTER 220.