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<h2> LETTER LXXVIII </h2>
<p>MR. LOVELACE, TO JOHN BELFORD, ESQ. [IN ANSWER TO LETTER LXV. OF THIS
VOLUME.] MONDAY, AUG. 7.</p>
<p>And so you have actually delivered to the fair implacable extracts of
letters written in the confidence of friendship! Take care—take
care, Belford—I do indeed love you better than I love any man in the
world: but this is a very delicate point. The matter is grown very serious
to me. My heart is bent upon having her. And have her I will, though I
marry her in the agonies of death.</p>
<p>She is very earnest, you say, that I will not offer to molest her. That,
let me tell her, will absolutely depend upon herself, and the answer she
returns, whether by pen and ink, or the contemptuous one of silence, which
she bestowed upon my last four to her: and I will write it in such humble,
and in such reasonable terms, that, if she be not a true Harlowe, she
shall forgive me. But as to the executorship which she is for conferring
upon thee—thou shalt not be her executor: let me perish if thou
shalt.—Nor shall she die. Nobody shall be any thing, nobody shall
dare to be any thing, to her, but I—thy happiness is already too
great, to be admitted daily to her presence; to look upon her, to talk to
her, to hear her talk, while I am forbid to come within view of her window—
What a reprobation is this, of the man who was once more dear to her than
all the men in the world!—And now to be able to look down upon me,
while her exalted head is hid from me among the stars, sometimes with
scorn, at other times with pity; I cannot bear it.</p>
<p>This I tell thee, that if I have not success in my effort by letter, I
will overcome the creeping folly that has found its way to my heart, or I
will tear it out in her presence, and throw it at her's, that she may see
how much more tender than her own that organ is, which she, and you, and
every one else, have taken the liberty to call callous.</p>
<p>Give notice of the people who live back and edge, and on either hand, of
the cursed mother, to remove their best effects, if I am rejected: for the
first vengeance I shall take will be to set fire to that den of serpents.
Nor will there be any fear of taking them when they are in any act that
has the relish of salvation in it, as Shakspeare says—so that my
revenge, if they perish in the flames I shall light up, will be complete
as to them.</p>
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