And pray, comment trouvez vous les dames sauvages? all pure and genuine nature, I suppose; none of the affected coyness of Europe: your attention there will be the more obliging, as the Indian heroes, I am told, are not very attentive to the charms of the beau sexe.
You are very sentimental on the subject of friendship; no one has more exalted notions of this species of affection than myself, yet I deny that it gives life to the moral world; a gallant man, like you, might have found a more animating principle:
O Venus! O Mere de l’Amour!
I am most gloriously indolent this morning, and would not write another line if the empire of the world (observe I do not mean the female world) depended on it.
Adieu!
J. Temple.
LETTER IV.4.
To John Temple, Esq; Pall Mall.
Quebec, July 1.
’Tis very true, Jack; I have no relish for the Misses; for puling girls in hanging sleeves, who feel no passion but vanity, and, without any distinguishing taste, are dying for the first man who tells them they are handsome. Take your boarding-school girls; but give me a woman; one, in short, who has a soul; not a cold inamimateinanimate form, insensible to the lively impressions of real love, and unfeeling as the wax baby she has just thrown away.
You will allow Prior to be no bad judge of female merit; and you may remember his Egyptian maid, the favorite of the luxurious King Solomon, is painted in full bloom.