THE WIFE OF BENEDICT ARNOLD. 195 He was an agreeable, winning, and handsome youth. The diligence of his biographer, the late Winthrop Sar- gent, has brought together some of his earliest letters, written when he was passionately in love with an extremely beautiful girl, who afterwards married the father of the celebrated Miss Edgeworth. He drew the portrait of this lady, which still exists, with several other efforts of his pencil and brush. His letters reveal to us an affectionate, ardent, innocent mind, and a talent for composition which practice might have developed into a decided gift. He tells his beloved in one of his letters how much he hates the slavery of his desk, and how he sits in the counting-house and indulges his imagination with anticipations of the future. " Borne on the soaring pinions of an ardent imagina- tion," he writes, " I wing my flight to the time when Heaven shall have crowned my labors with success and opulence. I see sumptuous palaces rising to receive me ; I see orphans and widows, and painters and fiddlers, and poets and builders protected and encouraged ; and when the fabric is pretty nearly finished by my shattered peri- cranium, I cast my eyes around and find John Andre" by a small coal fire, in a gloomy counting-house inWarnford Court, nothing so little as what he has been making himself, and, in all probability, never to be much" more than he is at present. But, oh ! My dear Honora ! It is for thy sake only I wish for wealth." Many of his letters are in this strain. He tells her, in one of them, that, for her sake he has overcome his repug- nance to a mercantile life, and that, if ever something whispers in his ear that he is not of the right stuff for a merchant, he draws his Honora's picture from his bosom, and the sight of that dear talisman so inspirits his industry, that no toil appears distressing. But this romantic affection in a merchant's clerk of
