I will not trouble you with speculations about peace and war.  The good or ill success of battles and embassies extends itself to a very small part of domestic life:  we all have good and evil, which we feel more sensibly than our petty part of public miscarriage or prosperity.  I am sorry for your disappointment, with which you seem more touched than I should expect a man of your resolution and experience to have been, did I not know that general truths are seldom applied to particular occasions; so that the fallacy of our self-love extends itself as wide as our interest and affections.  Every man believes that mistresses are unfaithful, and patrons capricious; but he excepts his own mistress and his own patron.  We have all learned that greatness is negligent and contemptuous, and that in courts, life is often languished away in ungratified expectation; but he that approaches greatness, or glitters in a court, imagines that destiny has at last exempted him from the common lot.

Do not let such evils overwhelm you as thousands have suffered and thousands have surmounted; but turn your thoughts with vigour to some other plan of life, and keep always in your mind that, with due submission to Providence, a man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.  Your patron’s weakness or insensibility will finally do you little hurt, if he is not assisted by your own passions.  Of your love I know not the propriety, nor can estimate the power; but in love, as in every other passion, of which hope is the essence, we ought always to remember the uncertainty of events.  There is indeed nothing that so much seduces reason from her vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman; and if all would happen that a lover fancies, I know not what other terrestrial happiness would deserve pursuit.  But love and marriage are different states.  Those who are to suffer the evils together, and to suffer often for the sakes of one another, soon lose that tenderness of look and that benevolence of mind which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and successive amusement.  A woman we are sure will not be always fair, we are not sure she will always be virtuous; and man cannot retain through life that respect and assiduity by which he pleases for a day or for a month.  I do not however pretend to have discovered that life has anything more to be desired than a prudent and virtuous marriage; therefore know not what counsel to give you.

If you can quit your imagination of love and greatness, and leave your hopes of preferment and bridal raptures to try once more the fortune of literature and industry, the way through France is now open.  We flatter ourselves that we shall cultivate with great diligence the arts of peace; and every man will be welcome among us who can teach us anything we do not know.  For your part, you will find all your old friends willing to receive you....

To MRS. THRALE