The World, thinking itself affronted by superior merit, takes delight to bring it down to its own level. - Samuel Richardson

He was determined never to marry a widow. If he did, it should be one, who had a vast fortune, and who never had a child. And he had still a more particular exception; and that was to a woman who had red hair. He held these exceptions till he was forty; and then being looked upon as a determin’d bachelor, no family thought it worth their while to make proposals to him:

I am forced, as I have often said, to try to make myself laugh, that I may not cry: for one or other I must do.

Why should such an angel be plunged so low as into the vulgar offices of domestic life? Were she mine, I should hardly wish to see her a mother unless there were a kind of moral certainty that minds like hers could be propagated.