"A fat woman trundling into a room on castors—in sitting can only lean against her chair—rings on her fingers, and her fat arms strangled with bracelets, which belt them like corded brawn—rolling and heaving when she laughs with the rattles in her throat, and a most apoplectic ogle— you wish to draw her out, as you would an opera-glass.
* * * * *
"A long lean man with all his limbs rambling—no way to reduce him to compass, unless you could double him like a pocket rule—with his arms spread, he'd lie on the bed of Ware like a cross on a Good Friday bun— standing still, he is a pilaster without a base—he appears rolled out or run up against a wall—so thin that his front face is but the moiety of a profile—if he stands cross-legged, he looks like a caduceus, and put him in a fencing attitude, you will take him for a piece of chevaux- de-frise—to make any use of him, it must be as a spontoon or a fishing- rod—when his wife's by, he follows like a note of admiration—see them together, one's a mast, and the other all hulk—she's a dome and he's built like a glass-house—when they part, you wonder to see the steeple separate from the chancel, and were they to embrace, he must hang round her neck like a skein of thread on a lace-maker's bolster—to sing her praise you should choose a rondeau, and to celebrate him you must write all Alexandrines.
"I wouldn't give a pin to make fine men in love with me—every coquette can do that, and the pain you give these creatures is very trifling. I love out-of-the-way conquests; and as I think my attractions are singular, I would draw singular objects.
"The loadstone of true beauty draws the heaviest substances—not like the fat dowager, who frets herself into warmth to get the notice of a few papier mache fops, as you rub Dutch sealing-wax to draw paper.
* * * * *
"If I were inclined to flatter I would say that, as you are unlike other women, you ought not to be won as they are. Every woman can be gained by time, therefore you ought to be by a sudden impulse. Sighs, devotion, attention weigh with others; but they are so much your due that no one should claim merit from them….
"You should not be swayed by common motives—how heroic to form a marriage for which no human being can guess the inducement—what a glorious unaccountableness! All the world will wonder what the devil you could see in me; and, if you should doubt your singularity, I pledge myself to you that I never yet was endured by woman; so that I should owe every thing to the effect of your bounty, and not by my own superfluous deserts make it a debt, and so lessen both the obligation and my gratitude. In short, every other woman follows her inclination, but you, above all things, should take me, if you do not like me. You will, besides, have the satisfaction of knowing that we are decidedly the worst match in the kingdom—a match, too, that must be all your own work, in which fate could have no hand, and which no foresight could foresee.
* * * * *
"A lady who affects poetry.—'I made regular approaches to her by sonnets and rebusses—a rondeau of circumvallation—her pride sapped by an elegy, and her reserve surprised by an impromptu—proceeding to storm with Pindarics, she, at last, saved the further effusion of ink by a capitulation.'