Having thus settled accounts
with my readers; I take up again the thread of my story, and thus I
proceed.
Mr. Hartley being now, as he believed, upon the point of disposing of his
daughter in marriage, began seriously to consider that he should want a
female companion to manage, his family, to nurse his ailments, and to
repair the breaches, that the hand of wintry time had made in his spirits
and his constitution. The reader will be pleased to recollect, that he had
already laid siege to the heart of the gentle Sophia. He now prosecuted
his affair with more alacrity than ever.
Alas, my dear readers! while we have been junketting along from
Southampton to Oxford, from Oxford to Windsor, and from Windsor to
Southampton back again, such is the miserable fate of human kind! Miss
Amelia Wilhelmina Cranley, the most pious of her sex, the flower of Mr.
Whitfield's converts, the wonder and admiration of Roger the cobler, has
given up the ghost. You will please then, in what follows, to represent to
yourselves the charms of Sophia as decked and burnished with a suit of
sables. Her exterior indeed was sable and gloomy, but her heart was far
superior to the attacks of wayward fate. She sat aloft in the region of
philosophy. She steeled her heart with the dignity of republicanism; for
her to drop one tear of sorrow would have been an eternal disgrace.
About this time--it was perhaps in reality a manoeuvre to forward the
affair, to which she had no aversion at bottom, with the father of
Delia--that Miss Cranley gave a grand entertainment, at which were present
Mr.
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