Page:Letters, sentences and maxims.djvu/299

 a great tendency to le faux brillant, le ranfiement, et l'entortillement. And Lord Roscommon would be more in the right now, than he was then, in saying, that

"The English bullion of one sterling line, Drawn to French wire, would through whole pages shine."

[Same date.]

—I confess, the pleasures of high life are not always strictly philosophical; and I believe a stoic would blame my indulgence; but I am yet no stoic, though turned of five-and-fifty; and I am apt to think that you are rather less so, at eighteen. The pleasures of the table, among people of the first fashion, may, indeed, sometimes, by accident, run into excesses; but they will never sink into a continued course of gluttony and drunkenness. The gallantry of high life, though not strictly justifiable, carries, at least, no external marks of infamy about it. [March 8, 1750.]

—I did not think that the present Pope was a sort of man to build seven modern little chapels at the expense of so respectable a piece of antiquity as the Coliseum. However, let his holiness' taste of vertu be ever so bad, pray get