Your cottagers are arrived; there is something very interesting in
Miss Williams, and the little boy is an infant Adonis.

Heaven send he may be an honester man than his father, or I foresee terrible devastations amongst the sex.

We have this moment your letter; I am angry with you for blaspheming the sweet season of nineteen: 

      “O lovely source
  Of generous foibles, youth! when opening minds
  Are honest as the light, lucid as air,
  As fostering breezes kind, as linnets gay,
  Tender as buds, and lavish as the spring.”

You will find out I am in a course of Shenstone, which I prescribe to all minds tinctured with the uncomfortable selfishness of the present age.

The only way to be good, is to retain the generous mistakes, if they are such, of nineteen through life.

As to you, my dear Rivers, with all your airs of prudence and knowing the world, you are, in this respect, as much a boy as ever.

Witness your extreme joy at having married a woman with two thousand pounds, when you might have had one with twenty times the sum.

You are a boy, Rivers, I am a girl; and I hope we shall remain so as long as we live.

Do you know, my dear friend, that I am a daughter of the Muses, and that I wrote pastorals at seven years old?

I am charmed with this, because an old physician once told me it was a symptom, not only of long life, but of long youth, which is much better.

He explained this, by saying something about animal spirits, which I do not at all understand, but which perhaps you may.

I should have been a pretty enough kind of a poetess, if papa had not attempted to teach me how to be one, and insisted on seeing my scribbles as I went on:  these same Muses are such bashful misses, they won’t bear to be looked at.

Genius is like the sensitive plant; it shrinks from the touch.

So your nabob cousin is arrived:  I hope he will fall in love with Emily; and remember, if he had obligations to Mrs. Rivers’s father, he had exactly the same to your grandfather.

He might spare ten thousand pounds very well, which would improve your petits soupers.

Adieu!  Sir William Verville dines here, and I have but just time to dress.

      Yours,
          A. Fitzgerald.

LETTER 219.

To Captain Fitzgerald.

Bellfield, Nov. 17, Morning.

I have had a letter from Colonel Willmott myself to-day; he is still quite unacquainted with the state of our domestic affairs; supposes me a batchelor, and talks of my being his son-in-law as a certainty, not attending to the probability of my having other engagements.

His history, which he tells me in this letter, is a very romantic one.  He was a younger brother, and provided for accordingly:  he loved, when about twenty, a lady who was as little a favorite of fortune as himself:  their families, who on both sides had other views, joined their interest to get him sent to the East Indies; and the young lady was removed to the house of a friend in London, where she was to continue till he had left England.