nature indifferent, and apt to receive whatever hue fancy can give it.  But children have a real character and an essential being of themselves:  they are amiable or unamiable per se; I must love or hate them as I see cause for either ’in their qualities.  A child’s nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being, and to be loved or hated accordingly:  they stand with me upon their own stock, as much as men and women do.  O! but you will say, sure it is an attractive age,—­there is something in the tender years of infancy that of itself charms us.  That is the very reason why I am more nice about them.  I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind.  One daisy differs not much from another in glory; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest.—­I was always rather squeamish in my women and children.

But this is not the worst:  one must be admitted into their familiarity at least, before they can complain of inattention.  It implies visits, and some kind of intercourse.  But if the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage,—­if you did not come in on the wife’s side,—­if you did not sneak into the house in her train, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on,—­look about you—­your tenure is precarious—­before a twelve-month shall roll over your head, you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you.  I have scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship did not commence after the period of his marriage.  With some limitations they can endure that:  but that the good man should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in which they were not consulted, though it happened before they knew him,—­before they that are now man and wife ever met,—­this is intolerable to them.  Every long friendship, every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with their currency, as a sovereign Prince calls in the good old money that was coined in some reign before he was born or thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in the world.  You may guess what luck generally befalls such a rusty piece of metal as I am in these new mintings.