“It would be with much greater pleasure I should take up my pen to tell you I am at Sandleford, if I could flatter myself with the hope of alluring you to it: you would find me in the character of a housewife. The meagre condition of the soil forbids me to live in the state of a shepherdess-queen, which I look upon as the highest rural dignity. The plough, the harrow, and the spade remind us that the golden age is past, and subsistence depends on labour; prosperity on industrious application. A little of the clay of which you complain, would do us a great deal of good. I should be glad to take my dominions here from the goddess Ceres to give them to the god Pan, and I think you will agree with me in that taste; for wherever he presides, there Nature’s republick is establish’d. The ox in his pasture is as free and as much at his ease as the proprietor of the soil, and the days of the first are not more shorten’d to feed the intemperance of others, than the rich landlord’s by the indulgence of his own. I look upon the goddess Ceres as a much less impartial and universally kind deity. The antients thought they did her honour by ascribing to her the invention of laws. We must consider her also as the mother of lawsuits and all the divisions, dissentions, and distinctions among mankind. Naturalists tell us all the oaks that have ever been, were contain’d in the first acorn. I believe we may affirm, by the same mode of reasoning, that all arts and sciences were contain’d in the first ear of corn. To possess lasting treasure and exclusive prosperity, has been the great business and aim of man. At Sandleford you will find us busy in the care of arable land. By two little purchases Mr. Montagu made here, my farm contains six hundred acres. As I now consider it an amazonian land, I affect to consider the women as capable of assisting in agriculture as much as the men. They weed my corn, hoe my turnips, and set my Pottatoes; and by these means promote the prosperity of their families. A landlord, where the _droit du seigneur_ prevailed, would not expose the complexions of his female vassals to the sun. I must confess my amazons hardly deserve to be accounted of the fair sex; and they have not the resources of pearl-powder and rouge when the natural lilies and roses have faded.