urt than frighten me into
measures which their hearts are so much bent to carry? A method they
have followed ever since.

Mean time, orders are given to all the servants to shew the highest
respect to Mr. Solmes; the generous Mr. Solmes is now his character with
some of our family! But are not these orders a tacit confession,
that they think his own merit will not procure him respect? He is
accordingly, in every visit he makes, not only highly caressed by the
principals of our family, but obsequiously attended and cringed to by
the menials.--And the noble settlements are echoed from every mouth.

Noble is the word used to enforce the offers of a man who is mean enough
avowedly to hate, and wicked enough to propose to rob of their just
expectations, his own family, (every one of which at the same time
stands in too much need of his favour,) in order to settle all he is
worth upon me; and if I die without children, and he has none by any
other marriage, upon a family which already abounds. Such are his
proposals.

But were there no other motive to induce me to despise the upstart man,
is not this unjust one to his family enough?--The upstart man, I repeat;
for he was not born to the immense riches he is possessed of: riches
left by one niggard to another, in injury to the next heir, because that
other is a niggard. And should I not be as culpable, do you think, in my
acceptance of such unjust settlements, as he is in the offer of them, if
I could persuade myself to be a sharer in them, or suffer a reversionary
expectation of possessing them to influence my choice?

Indeed, it concerns me not a little, that my friends could be brought to
encourage such offers on such motives as I think a person of conscience
should not presume to begin the world with.

But this it seems is the only method that can be taken to disappoint Mr.
Lovelace; and at the same time to answer all my relations have wish for
each of us. And surely I will not stand against such an accession to the
family as may happen from marrying Mr. Solmes: since now a possibility
is discovered, (which such a grasping mind as my brother's can easily
turn into a probability,) that my grandfather's estate will revert to
it, with a much more considerable one of the man's own. Instances of
estates falling in, in cases far more unlikely than this, are insisted
upon; and my sister says, in the words of an old saw, It is good to be
related to an estate.

While Solmes,