s could be brought as cheerfully to perform their
parts, I'd answer life for life for her recovery.

But who, that has so many ludicrous images raised in his mind by the
awkward penitence, can forbear laughing at thee? Spare, I beseech thee,
dear Belford, for the future, all thine own aspirations, if thou wouldst
not dishonour those of an angel indeed.

When I came to that passage, where thou sayest that thou considerest her*
as one sent from Heaven to draw thee after her--for the heart of me I
could not for an hour put thee out of my head, in the attitude of dame
Elizabeth Carteret, on her monument in Westminster Abbey. If thou never
observedst it, go thither on purpose: and there wilt thou see this dame
in effigy, with uplifted head and hand, the latter taken hold of by a
cupid every inch of stone, one clumsy foot lifted up also, aiming, as the
sculptor designed it, to ascend; but so executed, as would rather make
one imagine that the figure (without shoe or stocking, as it is, though
the rest of the body is robed) was looking up to its corn-cutter: the
other riveted to its native earth, bemired, like thee (immersed thou
callest it) beyond the possibility of unsticking itself. Both figures,
thou wilt find, seem to be in a contention, the bigger, whether it should
pull down the lesser about its ears--the lesser (a chubby fat little
varlet, of a fourth part of the other's bigness, with wings not much
larger than those of a butterfly) whether it should raise the larger to a
Heaven it points to, hardly big enough to contain the great toes of
either.

* See Letter XXXVII. of this volume.

Thou wilt say, perhaps, that the dame's figure in stone may do credit, in
the comparison, to thine, both in grain and shape, wooden as thou art all
over: but that the lady, who, in every thing but in the trick she has
played me so lately, is truly an angel, is but sorrily represented by the
fat-flanked cupid. This I allow thee. But yet there is enough in thy
aspirations to strike my mind with a resemblance of thee and the lady to
the figures on the wretched monument; for thou oughtest to remember,
that, prepared as she may be to mount to her native skies, it is
impossible for her to draw after her a heavy fellow who has so much to
repent of as thou hast.

But now, to be serious once more, let me tell you, Belford, that, if the
lady be really so ill as you write she is, it will become you [no Roman
style here!] in a case so v