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.