This, I suppose, will find you trying the force of your destructive charms on the savage dames of America; chasing females wild as the winds thro’ woods as wild as themselves:  I see you pursuing the stately relict of some renown’d Indian chief, some plump squaw arriv’d at the age of sentiment, some warlike queen dowager of the Ottawas or Tuscaroras.

And pray, comment trouvez vous les dames sauvages? all pure and genuine nature, I suppose; none of the affected coyness of Europe:  your attention there will be the more obliging, as the Indian heroes, I am told, are not very attentive to the charms of the beau sexe.

You are very sentimental on the subject of friendship; no one has more exalted notions of this species of affection than myself, yet I deny that it gives life to the moral world; a gallant man, like you, might have found a more animating principle: 

  O Venus!  O Mere de l’Amour!

I am most gloriously indolent this morning, and would not write another line if the empire of the world (observe I do not mean the female world) depended on it.

      Adieu! 
          J. Temple.

LETTER 4.

To John Temple, Esq; Pall Mall.

Quebec, July 1.

’Tis very true, Jack; I have no relish for the Misses; for puling girls in hanging sleeves, who feel no passion but vanity, and, without any distinguishing taste, are dying for the first man who tells them they are handsome.  Take your boarding-school girls; but give me a woman; one, in short, who has a soul; not a cold inanimate form, insensible to the lively impressions of real love, and unfeeling as the wax baby she has just thrown away.

You will allow Prior to be no bad judge of female merit; and you may remember his Egyptian maid, the favorite of the luxurious King Solomon, is painted in full bloom.

By the way, Jack, there is generally a certain hoity-toity inelegance of form and manner at seventeen, which in my opinion is not balanc’d by freshness of complexion, the only advantage girls have to boast of.

I have another objection to girls, which is, that they will eternally fancy every man they converse with has designs; a coquet and a prude in the bud are equally disagreeable; the former expects universal adoration, the latter is alarm’d even at that general civility which is the right of all their sex; of the two however the last is, I think, much the most troublesome; I wish these very apprehensive young ladies knew, their virtue is not half so often in danger as they imagine, and that there are many male creatures to whom they may safely shew politeness without being drawn into any concessions inconsistent with the strictest honor.  We are not half such terrible animals as mammas, nurses, and novels represent us; and, if my opinion is of any weight, I am inclin’d to believe those tremendous men, who have designs on the whole sex, are, and ever were, characters as fabulous as the giants of romance.