Lovelace is a very faulty man. You and I have thought him too gay,
too inconsiderate, too rash, too little an hypocrite, to be deep. You
see he never would disguise his natural temper (haughty as it
certainly is) with respect to your brother's behaviour to him. Where
he thinks a contempt due, he pays it to the uttermost. Nor has he
complaisance enough to spare your uncles.

But were he deep, and ever so deep, you would soon penetrate him, if
they would leave you to yourself. His vanity would be your clue.
Never man had more: Yet, as Mrs. Fortescue observed, 'never did man
carry it off so happily.' There is a strange mixture in it of
humourous vivacity:--Since but for one half of what he says of
himself, when he is in the vein, any other man would be insufferable.


***


Talk of the devil, is an old saying. The lively wretch has made me a
visit, and is but just gone away. He is all impatience and resentment
at the treatment you meet with, and full of apprehensions too, that
they will carry their point with you.

I told him my opinion, that you will never be brought to think of such
a man as Solmes; but that it will probably end in a composition, never
to have either.

No man, he said, whose fortunes and alliances are so considerable,
ever had so little favour from a woman for whose sake he had borne so
much.