ng away your happiness.

Sir George is handsome as an Adonis; you allow him to be of an
amiable character; he is rich, young, well born, and loves you; you
will have fine cloaths, fine jewels, a fine house, a coach and six; all
the _douceurs_ of marriage, with an extreme pretty fellow, who is
fond of you, whom _you see with pleasure, and prefer to all his sex_;
and yet you are discontented, because you have not for him at
twenty-four the romantic passion of fifteen, or rather that ideal
passion which perhaps never existed but in imagination.

To be happy in this world, it is necessary not to raise one's ideas
too high: if I loved a man of Sir George's fortune half as well as by
your own account you love him, I should not hesitate one moment about
marrying; but sit down contented with ease, affluence, and an
agreeable man, without expecting to find life what it certainly is not,
a state of continual rapture. 'Tis, I am afraid, my dear, your
misfortune to have too much sensibility to be happy.

I could moralize exceedingly well this morning on the vanity of
human wishes and expectations, and the folly of hoping for felicity in
this vile sublunary world: but the subject is a little exhausted, and I
have a passion for being original. I think all the moral writers, who
have set off with promising to shew us the road to happiness, have
obligingly ended with telling us there is no such thing; a conclusion
extremely consoling, and which if they had drawn before they set pen to
paper, would have saved both themselves and their readers an infinity
of trouble. This fancy of hunting for what one knows is not to be
found, is really an ingenious way of amusing both one's self and the
world: I wish people would either write to some purpose, or be so good
as not to write at all.

I believe I shall set about writing a system of ethics myself, which
shall be short, clear, and comprehensive; nearer the Epicurean perhaps
than the Stoic; but rural, refined, and sentimental; rural by all
means; for who does not know that virtue is a country gentlewoman? all
the good mammas will tell you, there is no such being to be heard of in
town.

I shall certainly be glad to see you, my dear; though I foresee
strange revolutions _in the state of Denmark_ from this event; at
present I have all the men to myself, and you must know I have a
prodigious aversion to divided empire: however, 'tis some comfort they
all know you are going to be married. Yo