ABSTRACT
I THANK you, dear Bethel, for your account of my worthy uncle, whom you seem, indeed, to have studied more than I have done. – Perhaps, according to worldly maxims, I have done wrong to have neglected him so much; but, to the overbearing and dictatorial consequence he assumes, I never could submit, even if I had happened to want the advantage I might have acquired by it. – The gross epicurism in which he indulges himself, while he repeats, with exaggeration, the vices of others, are traits of character so offensive to me, that whenever we meet, I am far from gaining his good opinion by flattery and acquiescence; and find it as much as I can do, to conceal the disgust I feel. – As we see each other, however, so seldom, and I levy no tax either on his affections or his pocket, I could wish he would not remember our relationship only to make me the object of his enquiries and his comments. – What business has he to talk of Mrs. Verney? – he, who never in his life was sensible of an attachment to a woman of honour, nor was ever capable of understanding such a character as hers. – The gross and odious reflections which he has taken the unwarrantable liberty to utter, I should find it impossible to avoid resenting, were he still nearer related to me. – I hope, therefore, before I see him again, that he will be furnished with some other topic of conversation, by his coffee-house friends at Bath; – men who having once had active bodies and inactive minds, are now deprived, by disease, of the former advantage, and are compelled to give to their shallow understandings obnoxious activity, to prevent a total stagnation of existence; or by the silly women, at whose card parties he passes his evenings, many of whom owe the prodigious virtue on which they value themselves, to that want of personal beauty, which prevented their ever being in danger. ‘Casta est, quam nemo rogavit,’59 says the proverb. – Heaven forgive me, if I judge uncharitably; but I very much suspect, that in common minds among the sex, this extreme and exquisite sense of delicacy, which always acquires peculiar energy after thirty-five, is much oftener the offspring of disappointed pride, than angelic purity. – Among the good matrons and virgins of this description, my uncle is a very oracle. – Among them he retails the conversation of the morning, and they make up together, in their evening vigils, those scandalous 285anecdotes, from even which Geraldine cannot escape, though, if they had not the power to give her a moment’s pain, I am sure they would not give me a moment’s thought. – Now, however, she is in France, and these arrows ‘dipped in double poison,’60 will not, I trust, reach her, unless some ‘d – n’d good natured friend’* should take the trouble, in pure kindness, to feather the shafts so as that they may reach her.
