To
be sure, now, I see your sisters Betty and Peggy vastly surprised at
my partiality, but tell them flatly, I don't value them, or their fine
skins, or eyes, or good sense, or--, a potato; for I say it, and will
maintain it, and as a convincing proof (I'm in a very great passion)
of what I assert, the Scotch ladies say it themselves. But to be less
serious; where will you find a language so pretty become a pretty
mouth as the broad Scotch? and the women here speak it in its highest
purity; for instance, teach one of their young ladies to pronounce
'Whoar wull I gong?' with a becoming wideness of mouth, and I'll lay
my life they will wound every hearer.
We have no such character here as a coquet, but alas! how many envious
prudes! Some days ago I walked into my Lord Kilcoubry's (don't be
surprised, my lord is but a glover), when the Duchess of Hamilton
(that fair who sacrificed her beauty to ambition, and her inward peace
to a title and gilt equipage) passed by in her chariot; her battered
husband, or more properly the guardian of her charms, sat by her side.
Straight envy began, in the shape of no less than three ladies who sat
with me, to find faults in her faultless form.--'For my part,' says
the first, 'I think what I always thought, that the Duchess has too
much red in her complexion.' 'Madam, I'm of your opinion,' says the
second; 'I think her face has a palish cast too much on the delicate
order.' 'And let me tell you,' adds the third lady, whose mouth was
puckered up to the size of an issue, 'that the Duchess has fine lips,
but she wants a mouth.
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