In short, we should have been continually endeavoring, following the luxuriancy of female imagination, to render more charming the sweet abodes of love and friendship; whilst our heroes, changing their swords into plough-shares, and engaged in more substantial, more profitable labors, were clearing land, raising cattle and corn, and doing every thing becoming good farmers; or, to express it more poetically,
“Taming the genius of the stubborn plain,
Almost as quickly as they conquer’d Spain:”
By which I would be understood to mean the Havannah, where, vanity apart, I am told both of them did their duty, and a little more, if a man can in such a case be said to do more.
In one word, they would have been studying the useful, to support us; we the agreable, to please and amuse them; which I take to be assigning to the two sexes the employments for which nature intended them, notwithstanding the vile example of the savages to the contrary.
There are now no farmeresses in Canada worth my contending with; therefore the whole pleasure of the thing would be at an end, even on the supposition that friendship had not been the soul of our design.
Say every thing for me to Temple and Mrs. Rivers; and to my dearest Emily, if arrived.
Adieu! your faithful
A. Fermor.
LETTER CL.152.
To the Earl of ————.
Silleri, June 6, 1767.