Adieu! Your affectionate
Ed. Rivers.
I will to-morrow shew you better grapes than any you have at Temple-house: you rich men fancy nobody has any thing good but yourselves; but I hope next year to shew you that you are mistaken in a thousand instances. I will have such roses and jessamines, such bowers of intermingled sweets—you shall see what astonishing things Emily’s taste and my industry can do.
LETTER CC.204.
To Mrs. Fitzgerald.
Bellfield, Oct. 22.
Finish your business, my dear girl, and let us see you again at Bellfield. I need not tell you the pleasure Mr. Fitzgerald’s accompanying you will give us.
I die to see you, my dear Bell; it is not enough to be happy, unless I have somebody to tell every moment that I am so: I want a confidante of my tenderness, a friend like my Bell, indulgent to all my follies, to talk to of the loveliest and most beloved of mankind. I want to tell you a thousand little instances of that ardent, that refined affection, which makes all the happiness of my life! I want to paint the flattering attention, the delicate fondness of that dear lover, who is only the more so for being a husband.
You are the only woman on earth to whom I can, without the appearance of insult, talk of my Rivers, because you are the only one I ever knew as happy as myself.
Fitzgerald, in the tenderness and delicacy of his mind, resembles strongly—
I am interrupted: adieu! for a moment.