TO THE HONOURABLE MISS AGAR.
Bursledon Lodge, Dec. 1, 1818.
It grieves me that any waters should be thought necessary for Mr. Ellis; and I am particularly sorry that he intends making his visit to Harrogate a time for study. Do explain to him the danger of this. Many persons cannot with impunity even write a letter. I wish he would do as our Continental friends, who are often wiser in their generation, especially in what relates to care of themselves. They lay aside not only their wisdom, but their dignity, at those places, and take the goods the gods provide, though these may come in the shape of people who, like the witches of Macbeth, ‘are not inhabitants of earth’ (that is, of the beau monde), ‘though they are on it.’ My fears for Mr. Ellis are that he will lead a sedentary, refined, grand, and melancholy old life, instead of the desultory, rambling, thought-dispelling existence which gives to these waters half their value.
I wish I could show you a bouncing, talking, conceited, squat, broad, rather plain, much adorned and little clothed Mrs. ——, who is so like Punch in Petticoats, from the loud shrillness and continuance of her talk, the showiness of her dress, and the vehemence of her gestures. She whirls like a tee-totum, and rattles like the machine placed to scare birds from a cherry-tree. But I am like Mˡˡᵉ de Fontanges (vide Sévigné), who said, on being offered liqueurs, ‘Madame, ce petit garçon oublie que je suis dévote’—only I am myself forgetting my resolutions, which is worse.
1818.—The following little sketch was never, so far as I know, even written out. I find it complete, but in the rough, with the erasures and interlineations of a first draft. It was intended to be one of a series, as is plain from a few lines written on the same sheet of paper, in which the writer says, ‘When we abound with writers who describe every object on every side, why should not one painter, taking up a lighter pencil and using a fainter colour, indicate rather than detail, and thus invite attention to real life by slight sketches, rather than by the fulness and perfection of a finished Dutch picture?’
HOLLAND HOUSE.
By the Ghost of La Bruyère.