When you compare me to a Jesuit and a Jew, you must be acting under the conviction of the slavery in which I am held by your fascinations! I would resent such treatment if experience in such matters had not taught me that in struggling against female caprice and despotism, the invariable effect is to draw one’s chains the tighter and to make them still more galling and potent.
If I buy the poetry without seeing it, it is obvious that affection gets the better of prudence, and that you and not the poems, are the chief object of my purchase. On such an occasion, I can only lament that my means are not equal to my inclination. Without meaning to play the Jesuit, I declare that you should draw on me for a thousand pounds, if my other engagements and the profits of my business enabled me to honour such a draft. My personal regard would assign no bounds, if I were not restrained by “Jewish” calculations and “Jesuitical” doubts!
In one word, then, I will give one hundred pounds for the
poems, to be drawn for at six and eight months, from the 25th of October; and I
will give other twenty-
| 292 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
The Wild Irish Girl begins to move as it ought and as I could wish. Another month’s sale equal to this last will occasion me to begin to think of a new edition. Charles Watson read the proofs, and he has great skill in your topics. Send me your corrections directly and I will use them.
The beauties of her younger sisters have brought the Novice into vogue, and for every twenty-four admirers of the former half-a-dozen start in favour of the latter.
But really you are too sanguine, even more so than I am; I, who half ruin myself by the warmth with which I espouse the interests of those with whom I am connected. You are in the high road to fame and reputation if you will not run out of the course.
Mr. Pratt is still at Woodstock; Dr. Wolcot dines with me every Sunday, at Hampstead, with some others of your admirers. I would not for the whole world tell them of our bickerings and of your hard dealings. Most of them, however (and what men have not), have suffered from the cruelty of your sex.
God speed and mend you, and, believe me, always
