seems to be a tacit condition, though not absolutely expressed in the
contract.

But to return to my plan: I think it an excellent one; and would
recommend it to all those young men about town, who, like me, find in
their hearts the necessity of loving, before they meet with an object
capable of fixing them for life.

By the way, I think the widows ought to raise a statue to my honor,
for having done my _possible_ to prove that, for the sake of
decorum, morals, and order, they ought to have all the men to
themselves.

I have this moment your letter from Rutland. Do you know I am almost
angry? Your ideas of love are narrow and pedantic; custom has done
enough to make the life of one half of our species tasteless; but you
would reduce them to a state of still greater insipidity than even that
to which our tyranny has doomed them.

You would limit the pleasure of loving and being beloved, and the
charming power of pleasing, to three or four years only in the life of
that sex which is peculiarly formed to feel tenderness; women are born
with more lively affections than men, which are still more softened by
education; to deny them the privilege of being amiable, the only
privilege we allow them, as long as nature continues them so, is such a
mixture of cruelty and false taste as I should never have suspected you
of, notwithstanding your partiality for unripened beauty.

As to myself, I persist in my opinion, that women are most charming
when they join the attractions of the mind to those of the person, when