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gained his admiration. Miss Catherine Freeman, on the other hand, possessed the idea, that no man could be a faithful lover who did not do so, and the most terrible disputes followed as a necessary consequence. For some time, however, these were scarcely worse than most lovers' quarrels; the young minister bore his troubles with befitting resignation, and between his books and the amusement he derived from occasional visits to his many fair friends, he managed to escape the bad effects of the lady's jealousy. But unfortunately the divine kept a journal of his daily occupations and thoughts, and registered not only how often he preached, what portions of the classics he read, the visits which he made his congregation, and other such things, but his opinions of the young ladies with whom he might chance to drink tea, and as his admiration was sometimes a little too amorous, his register was not a little curiously diversified in the nature of its contents. While, however, he took proper care of this journal, all was well; but it so happened that he one day left it within the reach of Miss Catherine Freeman, and the lady lost no time in making herself mistress of its dangerous secrets. The consequence was, an intimation to her lover, that if he did not forego the visits to his female friends, and rest contented with the charms of her conversation only, he must resign his hopes of her hand. In one of the numerous letters which the volumes contain on this important subject, the Doctor thus attempts his justification:

As for the papers, madam, I am far from accusing you of any failure of generosity in consulting them. I believe it is what almost any other woman in the world would have done, if she had been in your circumstances. I will very frankly confess, that what you met with in them might very reasonably give you some uneasiness; but really, madam, I cannot apprehend that they could ever justify such a degree of suspicion as you have entertained. There are several very remarkable passages, which plainly prove I was once very fond of an excellent friend, whom I now love with as much sincerity and respect, though not with such wild and unmanly transports, and in whose daily conversation I discover the most beautiful evidences of good sense, good nature, and religion. But then, madam, you will please to recollect, that this childish fondness for her was some considerable time before I began to make my addresses to you; and I was so little apprehensive that its knowledge would give you any offence that I very freely confessed it. I knew not one word of your seeing my journal, and yet often diverted myself with talking of it; and when you have expressed some uneasy apprehensions upon this head, I have always declared, that my friendship to her never interfered with those distinguishing regards which I owed to you; and I now as seriously repeat the declaration, as I could do it with my dying breath.

'As for what you mention with relation to the young lady at Coventry, I am sure you must refer to a passage of the 3d of July; for that is the only time that I have been there since I began my addresses to you-I have written thus:-"This day I breakfasted at Mr. R.'s with three pretty ladies, whom, perhaps, I was ready to admire a little too much,

especially Miss Rachael." I confess this looks a little odd in the journal of a lover!-but you must consider, madam, that you had treated me very ill the night before I set out for that journey, and plainly intimated that you were resolved to dismiss me: so that when I came thither, and saw three very agreeable ladies in the family, where I was to have boarded, and saw that freedom and openness of temper which was entirely agreeable to my own, I confess I could not forbear wishing that if I was forced to part with you, and the other circumstances of the Coventry invitation had been such as that I might have persuaded myself to accept it,-I confess I was ready to imagine, that the charming Miss Rachael (who I suppose is by this time married to the minister who is settled among them) might have done as much as any other person I knew towards making some compensation for the loss of the charming Miss Kitty!-This was but a random thought, and you see I checked myself for it; not as imagining it was any infidelity to you, but because it was a judgment formed upon too short an acquaintance. And now, madam, do not you yourself wonder, how you could infer from such a passage that I loved her better than I did you; and yet this you must infer,-if you would make it a vindication of the suspicion you have entertained, and of the manner in which you have treated me thereupon.

'You further argue from my behaviour to you since I came to Harborough; in which you say, you have plainly discerned the unquestionable marks of a declining passion. Here, likewise, I will frankly confess, that I have been guilty of some little negligence, which business, conversation, and many trifling accidents, which I cannot now particularly describe, may very fairly account for, and for which I have frequently asked your pardon. However, I do solemnly profess, that I have loved you since I came to Harborough as heartily, though not as extravagantly, as I ever did in my life. I have been, therefore, resolved to prosecute my affair with you as far as I prudently could; and though I was not for returning to Burton, till I thought there was some considerable probability that it was upon a pretty good bottom; yet I assure you I have often longed for that time, in the midst of all the good sense, the religion, and the friendship, with which I have been entertained here; but here was the killing stroke: you indulged a great many unaccountable fancies, which had really no solid foundation, and so tormented yourself in my absence; and then when I came to see you, and brought with me a heart full of tenderness and love, you received me on almost every occasion with indifference or indignation. This is what I often told you I was not prepared to bear, and sufficiently intimated my apprehension that it would prove fatal to my love; and I must be so honest as to confess, that it has, in fact, given it a shock which I fear I shall never be able perfectly to recover; and has done much more to impair my affection to you, and my expectation of happiness with you, within a few weeks, than I could have believed possible. You, madam, have been wearying me every time you saw me with repeated declarations, that you were fully convinced our tempers could never suit; that you could never make yourself easy in the thoughts of spending your life with me; that you could not credit any of the professions which I made of my love; and that you had reconciled yourself to the thoughts of parting. You know, madam, it was a long time before you could bring me to be of this mind; but when I came to

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consider of the affair at a distance from the blaze of those charms which have often dazzled my reason, and melted down my resolution, I was convinced of the justice of what you had said. When I reflected upon your former resentments, and compared them with my own temper, I very plainly saw that in the course of my life, I should almost daily repeat many of those things which had given you so much disquietude. I therefore resolved not to affect any air of excessive fondness, but to leave the affair to your determination, and to acquiesce in that, whatsoever it might be.

When I was in this temper, you, madam, to my unspeakable surprise, put the affair upon a new footing; you told me you could not be easy if I kept up my familiarity at Harborough, and persisted in my resolution of a journey to Bedford, and other appointments of that nature. I then thought, and I am still of the same opinion, that this was going entirely out of your way, and prescribing to me in particulars which ought to be left to my own discretion to determine; and I fancied if I could think it prudent to put my love to such kind of tests, I must either leave you in continual suspicion of it, which would have made me miserable as a husband, or have engaged myself to a fond kind of severity, to which I could never long have submitted. I recollected what trifles your jealousy had sometimes engaged you to resent; what unaccountable constructions you had sometimes put upon the most innocent of my words and actions; and therefore, upon the whole, I thought it prudent and rational rather to take a dismission upon these terms, than to yield to demands of such a kind; and herein I had the concurrence of some few of the wisest and best of my friends, to whom I made a faithful representation of the case. I determined upon this course, not because I did not love you well enough to make you a very good husband, but because I did not think I owed any woman in the world so much deference as you seemed to expect; indeed you have expressly declared such singular notions of a husband as I am sure I could never have complied with. I am all this while well assured of the excellency of your character in general, and was never more charmed with your behaviour in my life, than I was in some of my last visits; but when I was fully persuaded in my own mind that we should be unhappy together, and you declared you could not comply with my terms, which I still think to be entirely reasonable, my love and friendship to you served only to confirin me in my resolution of desisting, that I might not injure so excellent a creature.

You charged me with having parted with indifference; but there I am sure, madam, you do me a great deal of wrong. I confess I strove to dismiss a thousand fond sentiments which arose in my heart, because I knew that to have given vent to them would only have made the necessary separation much more painful to us both. Since that time I have endeavoured to divert myself with business and conversation as much as I could; and, upon the whole, have been carried through this terrible trial better than I expected; but yet I must assure you, that I never knew so many uneasy hours in any month of my life, when I have been in perfect health, as I have known upon your account, since the beginning of this.'-vol. i., pp. 94-100.

The letter is concluded by many persuasions against jealousy, and on this topic, the writer continued to insist, in all his after

addresses. But we find in one of his letters to a lady of his acquaintance, a still further exposition of the affair :

'I told you in my last that I had lost my mistress. But what would you say if I should now add, that she upbraids me as one of the basest and most inhuman of men, and insinuates her complaints not only through our own congregation, but the whole neighbourhood. I have not time now to tell you my story at large. This only I must tell you in general, that I have the testimony of my own conscience in the sight of God, that I have acted with the utmost integrity, nay, with the tenderest affection towards her, and that my case is so plain, that I have never yet met with a single person who does not acquit me upon hearing it: my only grief is, that she exposes herself -for, I bless God, my character is too well established among those who are intimately acquainted with me to be easily overthrown by her passionate accusations. My crime in short is this: When I had borne with the most unreasonable jealousy, and the most tumultuous passion for several months together; when she had been declaring to me about five hundred times that she was confident she should be one of the most unhappy creatures upon earth with a man of my temper, and had been earnestly entreating, as the greatest evidence of my friendship to her, that I would trouble her with no more addresses of courtship, I did at last comply with her importunity, and consented to quit the pursuit. This was not till she had taken upon herself to prescribe what company I should keep; and had expressly forbidden me, upon pain of her highest displeasure, to keep up any further correspondence with some of the dearest of my friends, though she acknowledged I am under very high obligations to them, and that they have very few equals in religion, good sense, and politeness, even in the female world. As I was fully convinced by these demands, in conjunction with the whole course of her previous behaviour, that it was absolutely necessary for us to part; and at the same time felt in my own breast such a lingering fondness as was ready to bear down all the remonstrances of reason, and the advice of the most pious and judicious of my friends, I did not dare to be much in her company; and, to tell you the plain truth, rather avoided than courted opportunities of meeting her. This she exclaimed against as the blackest villainy, and a very sufficient justification of those jealousies which she formerly entertained of my love to her; though I have always declared they were false, and sometimes with circumstances of solemnity, which nothing could have warranted but the importance of the affair.

Such is the treatment I have met with from one whom I loved; not barely with sincerity, but extravagance; and it wounds me so much the deeper, as she is a woman of so admirable a character, that I have often thought, abating this one unfortunate feature in her mind a predisposition towards jealousy, I do not know a person in the world who more nearly resembles you.'-pp. 105-107.

It is not, however, the least entertaining part of the subject, to see the ardent lover and retired student, in the midst of his distress concerning his quarrel with Miss Freeman, remonstrating with another young lady for her coolness towards him. The affair, in fact, of the Doctor's courtships, for the word must be in the plural,

is altogether a mystery, and a very odd one, but as it brings him before us in a new character, we extract the letters which refer to it as the most likely to prove interesting to the reader. The following is one of those to which we allude, and was written within a few months after those already quoted. It is addressed to a Miss Jennings :

in

'Dear Jennings,

January, 1726.

You will probably be surprised, that in the midst of the familiarity of daily conversation, I have recourse to the formality of a letter; and still more, when you find it is to tell you seriously, that there are some things your behaviour which I am so far from admiring, that I think it worth my while to spend half an hour on a Saturday morning to engage you, if I can, to reform them. To come directly to the point, there are some particular seasons, which have occurred oftener within this last month than in all the other fourteen I have been at Harborough, in which you seem to imagine that you have a Dispensation to treat me just as you please, without any regard to the considerations, not only of friendship, but of common politeness! I have not time to tell stories with pen and ink, and so will not enter into particulars; besides, the instances are individually so trifling as not to deserve mention, though when ten or twenty occur in a day, they amount to something that cannot be seen without observation, nor borne without some resentment; at least, where there is not a perfect indifference, which, by the way, they have a great tendency to produce.

I appeal, my dear, to yourself, whether it be decent entirely to disregard many instances of kindness and respect, which though in themselves very little, are such as evince a mind disposed to please you; whether even so very a trifle as a cup of tea, when offered with civility and good humour, ought not either to be received or refused with a smile or a nod. Or, if an air of pettishness in the whole behaviour, be the most agreeable and equitable way of refusing those innocent freedoms which you know at the worst are but the errors of excessive tenderness.

After all, my dear, I own that these are but little faults, yet when they recur frequently, they throw a blemish upon a character that would be otherwise very agreeable.

I have been something more surprised at such behaviour to me, as I know, that since I came into the family, I have loved you most heartily, and treated you not only with constant civility, but with tender friendship. It is with pleasure that I have discovered any opportunity of serving or pleasing you. I have spoken of you with the most affectionate respect in your absence, and almost quarrelled with some of the wisest and best of my friends, for charging you with that negligence and affectation of which I have now reminded you; and you yourself know, that when you have been disposed to quarrel and find fault, you could fix on nothing but an excess of fondness. Forgive me this wrong!

And yet, on the other hand, I can never believe that you apprehend that I offer myself as a lover, and that it is therefore necessary to treat me with an air of coldness and scorn, that I may not take too much encouragement. I know not whether your late complaisant refusals were in jest or earnest; but of this I am sure, that if they were in jest, they had not

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