heart as vacant, and to proceed to a new
election.

I claim no more than a share in her esteem and remembrance, which I
dare say I shall never want.

That I have amused myself a little in the dowager way, I am very far
from denying; but you will observe, it was less from taste than the
principle of doing as little mischief as possible in my few excursions
to the world of gallantry. A little deviation from the exact rule of
right we men all allow ourselves in love affairs; but I was willing to
keep as near it as I could. Married women are, on my principles,
forbidden fruit; I abhor the seduction of innocence; I am too
delicate, and (with all my modesty) too vain, to be pleased with venal
beauty: what was I then to do, with a heart too active to be absolutely
at rest, and which had not met with its counterpart? Widows were, I
thought, fair prey, as being sufficiently experienced to take care of
themselves.

I have said married women are, on my principles, forbidden fruit: I
should have explained myself; I mean in England, for my ideas on this
head change as soon as I land at Calais.

Such is the amazing force of local prejudice, that I do not
recollect having ever made love to an English married woman, or a
French unmarried one. Marriages in France being made by the parents,
and therefore generally without inclination on either side, gallantry
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,