A thousand distresses of various kinds had sunk my spirits to the lowest ebb; but your letter has rekindled my extinguished hopes. In dissipating my fears, it has rendered my anxiety the more supportable. I feel now I have strength enough to bear up under it. You live, you love me; neither your own nor the blood of your friend has been spilt, and your honour is secured; I am not then compleatly miserable. Fail not to meet me to-morrow. I never had so much reason for seeing you, nor so little hope of having that pleasure long. Farewell, my dear friend, instead of saying let us live but to love, you should have said alas! let us love that we may live. Letter LXII. From Clara. Must I be always, my dear cousin, under the necessity of performing the most disagreeable offices of friendship? Must I always, in the bitterness of my own heart, be giving affliction to yours, by cruel intelligence? Our sentiments, alas! are the same, and you are sensible I can give no new uneasiness to you which I have not first experienced myself. O that I could but conceal your misfortune without increasing it! or that a friendship like ours were not as binding as love! How readily might I throw off that chagrin I am now obliged to communicate. Last night, when the concert was over, and your mother and you were gone home, in company with your friend and Mr. Orbe, our two fathers and my Lord B---- were left to talk politics together; the disagreeableness of the subject, of which indeed I am quite surfeited, soon made me retire to my own chamber. In about half an hour, I heard the name of your friend repeated with some vehemence; on which I found the conversation had changed its subject, and therefore listened to it with some attention; when I gathered, by what followed, that his lordship had ventured to propose a match between you and your friend, whom he frankly called his, and on whom, as such, he offered to make a suitable settlement. Your father rejected the proposal with disdain, and upon that the conversation began to grow warm. “I must tell you sir, said my lord, that, notwithstanding your prejudices, he is of all men the most worthy of her, and perhaps the most likely to make her happy. He has received from nature every gift that is independent of the world; and has embellished them by all those talents, which depended on himself. He is young, tall, well-made, and ingenious: he has the advantages of education, sense, manners, and courage; he has a fine genius and a sound mind; what then does he require to make him worthy of your daughter? Is it a fortune? He shall have one. A third part of my own will make him the richest man of this country; nay, I will give him, if it be necessary, the half. Does he want a title? Ridiculous prerogative, in a country where nobility is more troublesome than useful! But, doubt it not, he is noble: not that his nobility is made out in writing upon an old parchment, but it is engraven in indelible characters on his heart.