Speech ventilates our intellectual fire:
Speech burnishes our mental magazine:
Brightens for ornament, and whets for use.”
Come then, Matilda, participate the pleasures, and accelerate the improvement, of your affectionate friend,
LAURA GUILFORD.
To Miss LAURA GUILFORD.
Beverly.
DEAR LAURA,
Yours of the 9th ult. has just come to hand. It gave me renewed experience of the truth of the observation, that next to the personal presence and conversation, is the epistolary correspondence of a friend. I am preparing, with the most lively sensations of pleasure, to gratify my own wishes, and comply with your polite invitation. The romantic beauty of the rural scenes has forsaken me; and what can so amply compensate for their absence, as the charms you offer?
I envy you nothing which the town affords, but the advantages you derive from the choice of society adapted to your own taste. Your sentiments of the fashionable diversion of card-playing, are, in my view, perfectly just. I believe that many people join in it, because it is the ton, rather than from any other motive. And as such persons generally pay the greatest deference to Lord Chesterfield’s opinions and maxims, I have often wondered how they happened to overlook, or disregard his animadversions upon this subject; and have felt a strong inclination to tell them, that this all-accomplished master of politeness, and oracle of pleasure, expressly says, “All amusements, where neither the understanding nor the senses can have the least share, I look upon as frivolous, and the resources of little minds, who either do not think, or do not love to think.”