To write daily in absence is an excellent habit in marriage. As daily prayer nourishes our soul, so does daily correspondence feed the religion of the heart.
Man seems to bear a strange resemblance to the planet he inhabits. His mind appears composed of layers, like the earth. There is the layer of education, and that of habit; the ideas he avows to the world; those within, which he avows to his friends; under those, what he acknowledges to himself; and yet deeper, what he really feels without daring even a self-avowal.
In the Macobar Islands everything a man possesses is buried with him, and the dead are spoken of no more. In highly polished and dissipated society this practice seems gaining ground.
A jesting account of women by a woman.—Women are kind to men, unkind to one another. The best point in their character is that they are good nurse-tenders; the worst, that they seldom speak a word of absolute truth. They are envious of beauty, singing, dancing, dress, wealth, and rank, in their own sex, but not the least so of goodness, sense, or domestic happiness.
To have too clear an insight into one’s own mind is sometimes a misfortune, for one magnifies one’s own meditations and chimeras, till they assume ‘a local habitation and a name,’ and then one acts upon them as if they were realities.
There are few more effectual ways of displeasing, than dwelling on our own happiness, except to those who consider themselves as the authors of it. Artful and designing women are so aware of the converse of this principle, that an interesting and melancholy story of which self is the heroine, is one of their most common and yet most successful means of seduction.
An enthusiastic manner generally denotes either mediocrity, or affectation, or both. Those who possess a deep knowledge of the fine arts, never converse on the subject but most reluctantly, and by a sort of force. Such, I recollect, was the case with Sir William Hamilton. Smatterers cannot see a parish church without a comparison between Gothic and Grecian architecture, nor a Turk’s head on a sign-post without referring to ‘classical contours’ and ‘the Apollo Belvedere.’
A charity sermon is a satire on man. That he should require to be adjured by every motive spiritual and temporal, and courted by every form of eloquence, to grant a small portion of his superfluity for the relief of human misery, is most wonderful.
The affectation of sensibility seldom imposes on those who possess the reality. The performer may have learned the tune, but will be out of time. The poco piu or the poco meno will expose him.