IN a recent issue of this journal I announced Aaron Hill as the source for an untraced erotic verse quotation cited in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.1 The quotation consists of six lines drawn from Hill's ‘Picture of Love’ that appear in Richardson's novel under the pen of Lovelace in the fourth volume of the first edition (later excised from the second edition). The Hill source must have been intended to be a constitutive element in Lovelace's imagination since another untraced quotation from it appears, to quite different effect, in Clarissa's sixth volume. As his conscience increasingly unsettles him, Lovelace boards a carriage to Mr Smith's glove-shop in Covent Garden where Clarissa secretly lies in recovery. The fidgety Lovelace contemplates his condition and talks directly to his knees, ‘telling them how they must bend’—a gesture of supplication recalling Clarissa's mother's stern warning that, to effect genuine contrition, ‘Your heart, not your knees, must bend’. Sitting in his wedding suit, with his heart ‘bounding in almost audible thumps’, Lovelace recites to himself a verse quotation from ‘a charming describer’: Tenderly kneeling, thus will I complain; Thus court her pity; and thus plead my pain; Thus sigh for fancied frowns, if frowns should rise; And thus meet favour in her soft’ning eyes.2 Tenderly bowing, thus, will we complain, Thus, court her pity, and, thus, plead our pain; Thus, sigh at fancy’d frowns, if frowns shou’d rise, And, thus, meet favours, in her soft’ning eyes.