 lay aside her meditated vengeance? A woman too, that had fallen beneath herself in the object of that despised Love.
Allow me, Grandison, to say so. In the account of wordly reckoning, it was so. And when I thought I hated you, it was so in my own account. Yet could you have returned my Love, I would have gloried in my choice: and attributed to envy all the insolent censures of maligners.
But even at the seventh perusal, when my indignation began to give way, would it have given way, had you not, in the same Letter, hinted, that the proud Bologna had given up all thoghts of a husband in the man to whom my heart had been so long attached?—Allow me to call her by the name of her city. I love not her, nor her family. I hate them by their own proud names. It is an hereditary hatred, augmented by rivalry, a rivalry that had like to have been a successful one: And is she not proud, who, whatever be her motive, can refuse the man, who has rejected a nobler woman? Yet I think I ought to forgive her; for has she not avenged me? If you are grieved, that she has refused you. I am rejoiced. Be the pangs she has so often given me, if possible, forgotten!
What a miserable wretch, however, from my own reflexions, did this intelligence make me! Intelligence that I received before your Letter blessed m hands. Let me so express myself; the contents, I hope, will be the means of blessings, by purifying my heart!—And why a miserable wretch?—O this man, of sentiments the most delicate, of life and manners the most unblameable; yet of air and behaviour so truly gallant, had it not been for thy forwardness, Olivia; had it not been for proposals, shame to thyself! shame to thy sex! too plainly intimated to him; proposals that owed their existence to inconsiderate Love;

a Love mingled, I will now confess, with passions of the darkest hue—Envy, malice—and those aggravated by despair—would, on this disappointment from the Bologna, have offered his hand to the Florentine!—But now do I own, that it cannot, that it ought not to be. For what, Olivia, is there in the glitter of thy fortune, thy greatest dependence, to attract a man, whom worldly grandeur cannot influence? Who has a fortune of his own so ample, that hundreds are the better for it?—A man, whose oeconomy is
