Il mondo forma i suoi giudizi sulle nostre azioni piuttosto dai fatti che da dove stia la ragione nei casi dubbi. - Samuel Richardson

Love-matches, my dear, are foolish things. I know not how you will find it some time hence: No general rule, however, without exceptions, you know. Violent Love on one side, is enough in conscience, if the other be not a fool, or ungrateful: The Lover and Lovée make generally the happiest couple. Mild, sedate convenience, is better than a stark staring-mad passion. The wall-climbers, the hedge and ditchleapers, the river-forders, the window-droppers, always find reason to think so. Who ever hears of darts, flames, Cupids, Venus’s, Adonis’s, and suchlike nonsense, in matrimony? — Passion is transitory; but discretion, which never bois over, gives durable happiness.

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:

O! what a Godlike Power is that of doing Good! — I envy the Rich and the Great for nothing else!