📔 Romance and Reality

A woman's love is essentially lonely and spiritual in its nature—feeding on fancy, rather than hope—or like that fairy flower of the East, which floats in, and lives upon, the air. Her attachment is the heathenism of the heart: she has herself created the glory and beauty with which the idol of her altar stands invested.

In good truth, I hardly know—a Miss Arundel—a wood-nymph, the daughter of either a country squire or a clergyman—equipped, I suppose, by a mortgage on either the squire's corn-fields, or the parson's glebe land—[..]

Above all, let her eschew the impertinence of invention; let her leave genius to her milliner.

"The ancients referred melancholy to the mind, the moderns make it matter of digestion—to either case my plan applies," said Lady Mandeville.

I never knew any debatable point not maintained on both sides by unanswerable arguments; and yet you are angry that he has not thrown every advantage aside to enact your beau-idéal of patriotic excellence.

Motives are like harlequins—there is always a second dress beneath their first.

"But, sir," said Mr. Brande—who, being a traveller himself, considered that their injuries were personal ones—"look at the long years of obloquy and wrong, of taunts and doubts, which embittered Bruce's return home."

No one can deny Lady Charlotte Bury's assertion, that no well-regulated young female will ever indulge in a species of amusement so improper as flirtation; but it must be admitted, that having a pleasant partner is preferable to not dancing, and that a little persiflage, a little raillery, a little flattery, go far to make a partner pleasant.

Portraits are but the mirrors of lovely countenances.

And married she was, thanks to the affinities of landed property!