THE CHOICE OF A HUSBAND (SEPTEMBER, 1653).

THE CHOICE OF A HUSBAND (SEPTEMBER, 1653).

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.