“But I have always endeavoured” [And I, Har-riet, wish you had succeeded in your endeavours] “ to keep down any foolish pride” — Then you own that pride you have? — Another point gained! Con-science, honest conscience, ivill now-and-then make you women speak out. But now I think of it, here is vanity in the very humility. Well say you endea-voured, when female pride, like love, though hid under a barrel, will flame out at the bung.

Well, said I, to your aunt Selby, to your grand-mamma, and to your cousin Lucy, when we all met to sit in judgment upon your letters, now I hope you’ll never dispute with me more on this flagrant love of admiration which I have so often observed swallows up the hearts and souls of you all; since your Harriet is not exempt from it; and since with all your speciousness, with all her prudence, with all her caution, she (taken with the qualm of conscience) owns it.

But, no, truly! All is right that you say: all is right that you do! — Your very confessions are brought as so many demonstrations of your diffi-dence, of your ingenuousness, and I cannot tell what.

Why, 1 must own, that no father ever loved his daughter as I love my niece: but yet, girl, your faults, your vanities, I do not love. It is my glory, that 1 think myself able to judge of my friends as they deserve; not as being my friends. Why, the best beloved of my heart, your aunt herself — you know, I value her now more, now less, as she deserves. But with all those I have named, and with all your relations, indeed, their Harriet cannot be in fault. And why? Because you are related to them; and because they attribute to themselves some merit from the relation they stand in to you. Super eroga-torians all of them (I will make words whenever I please) with their attributions to you; and because you are of their sex, forsooth; and because I accuse you in a point in which you are all concerned, and so make a common cause of it.

Here one exalts you for your good sense; because you have a knack, by help of a happy memory, of making every thing you read, and every thing that is told you, that you like, your own (your grand-father’s precepts paiticularly); and because, I think, you pass upon us as your own what you have borrowed, if not stolen.

Another praises you for your good-nature — The deuce is in it, if a girl who has crowds of admirers after her, and a new lover wherever she shows her bewitching face; who is blest with health and spi-rits; and has every-body for her friend, let her de serve it or not; can be z//-natured. Who can such a one have to quarrel with, trow?