that letter is written with: and which also appears in some of the
conversations you have given me an account of. See you not in her
passiveness, what boisterous spirits can obtain from gentler, merely by
teasing and ill-nature?

I know the pride they have always taken in calling you a Harlowe--
Clarissa Harlowe, so formal and so set, at every word, when they are
grave or proudly solemn.--Your mother has learnt it of them--and as in
marriage, so in will, has been taught to bury her own superior name
and family in theirs. I have often thought that the same spirit
governed them, in this piece of affectation, and others of the like
nature (as Harlowe-Place, and so-forth, though not the elder brother's
or paternal seat), as governed the tyrant Tudor,* who marrying
Elizabeth, the heiress of the house of York, made himself a title to
a throne, which he would not otherwise have had (being but a base
descendant of the Lancaster line); and proved a gloomy and vile
husband to her; for no other cause, than because she had laid him
under obligations which his pride would not permit him to own.--Nor
would the unprincely wretch marry her till he was in possession of the
crown, that he might not be supposed to owe it to her claim.


* Henry VII.


You have chidden me, and again will, I doubt not, for the liberties I
take with some of your relations. But my dear, need I tell you, that
pride in ourselves must, and for ever will, provoke contempt, and
bring down upon us abasement from others?--Have we not, in the case of
a celebrated bard, observed, that those who aim at more than their