=Source.=--_Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple._
British Museum, Add. MSS. 33,975. Letter 39.
There are a great many ingredients must go to the making me happy in
a husband; first, as my Cousin F. says, our humours must agree; and
to do that he must have that kind of breeding that I have had, and
used that kind of company; that is, he must not be so much a country
gentleman as to understand nothing but hawks and dogs, and be fonder
of either than of his wife; nor of the next sort of them whose aim
reaches no further than to be Justice of Peace, and once in his life
High Sheriff, who reads no books but statutes, and studies nothing
but how to make a speech interlarded with Latin that may amaze his
disagreeing poor neighbours, and fright them rather than persuade
them into quietness. He must not be a thing that began the world in
a free school, was sent from thence to the University, and is at his
furthest when he reaches the Inns of Court, has no acquaintance but
those of his form in these places, speaks the French he has picked
out of old laws, and admires nothing but the stories he has heard of
the revels that were kept there before his time. He may not be a town
gallant neither, that lives in a tavern and an ordinary, that cannot
imagine how an hour should be spent without company unless it be in
sleeping, that makes court to all the women he sees, thinks they
believe him, and laughs and is laughed at equally. Nor a travelled
Monsieur whose head is all feather inside and outside, that can talk
of nothing but dances and duels, and has courage enough to wear
slashes, when everybody else dies with cold to see him. He must not
be a fool of no sort, nor peevish, nor ill-natured, nor proud, nor
covetous, and to all this must be added that he must love me and
I him as much as we are capable of loving. Without all this, his
fortune, though never so great, would not satisfy me; and with it a
very moderate one would keep me from ever repenting my disposal....
I have been thinking of sending you my picture till I could come
myself; but a picture is but dull company, and that you need not;
besides I cannot tell whether it be very like me or not, though 'tis
the best I ever had drawn for me, and Mr. Lely will have it that he
never took more pains to make a good one in his life, and that was
it, I think, that spoiled it. He was condemned for making the first
that he drew of me a little worse than I, and in making this better
he has made it as unlike as t' other. He is now, I think, at my Lord
Paget's at Marlow, where I am promised he shall draw a picture of my
Lady for me--she gives it me, she says, as the greatest testimony of
her friendship to me, for by her own rule she is past the time of
having pictures taken of her. After eighteen, she says, there is no
face but decays apparently: I would fain have had her except such as
had never been beauties, for my comfort, but she would not.