Tuesday, January 31. I am already, my dear Lucy, quite contrary to my own expectation, enabled to obey the third gene-ral injunction laid upon me at parting, by you, and all my dear friends; since a gentleman, not incon-siderable in his family or fortune, has already beheld your Harriet with partiality.

Not to heighten your impatience by unnecessary parade, his name is Folder. He is a young gentle-man of an handsome independent fortune, and still larger expectations from a Welch uncle now in town, Sir Rowland Meredith, knighted in his sheriffalty, on occasion of an address which he brought tip to the king from his county.

Sir Rowland, it seems, requires from his nephetr, on pain of forfeiting his favour for ever, that he mar-ries not without his approbation: which, he de clares, he never will give, except the woman be of a good family; has a gentlewoman’s fortune; has had the benefit of a religious education; which he considers as the best security that can be given for her good behaviour as a wife, and as a mother; so for-ward does the good knight look! Her” character unsullied: acquainted with the theory of the do-mestic duties, and not ashamed, occasionally, to en ter into the direction of the practice. Her fortune, however, as his nephew will have a good one, he declares to be the least thing he stands upon; only that he would have her possessed of from six to ten thousand pounds, that it may not appear to be a match of mere love, and as if his nephew were taken in, as he calls it, rather by the eyes than by the understanding. Where a woman can have such a fortune given her by her family, though no greater, it will be an earnest, he says, that the family she is of have worth, as he calls it, and want not to owe obligations to that of the man she marries.

Something particular, something that has the look of forecast and prudence, you’ll say, in the old knight.

O but I had like to have forgot; his future niece must also be handsome. He values himself, it seems, upon the breed of his horses and dogs, and makes polite comparisons between the more noble, and the less noble animals.

Sir Rowland himself, as you will guess by his par-ticularity, is an old batchelor, and one who wants to have a woman made on purpose for his nephew: and who positively insists upon qualities, before In-knows her, not one of which, perhaps, his future niece will have.