Fashion is a great restraint upon your persons of taste and fancy; who would otherwise in the most trifling instances be able to distinguish themselves from the vulgar.

I have been formerly so silly as to hope that every servant I had might be made a friend; I am now convinced that the nature of servitude generally bears a contrary tendency. People's characters are to be chiefly collected from their education and place in life; birth itself does but little.

In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.

Long sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.

Flattery of the verbal kind is gross. In short, applause is of too coarse a nature to be swallowed in the gross, though the extract or tincture be ever so agreeable.

Persons are oftentimes misled in regard to their choice of dress by attending to the beauty of colors, rather than selecting such colors as may increase their own beauty.

Taste and good-nature are universally connected.