PITHY QUOTES FROM PAST MASTERS
My dearest William,
I am lost in astonishment! My nerves are paralysed!! My eyeballs are nearly burst in straining to collect some little portion of sound sense from the long epistle you did me the honour to send with my address attached to it some day in July last. Were you Mad? or rather had not the bright though bitter Hodgson been too potent for your poor dear brains? I know not whether you penned your letter in early morn ‘that sweet hour of prime’ or at ‘high Noon’ or by the light of the ‘conscious Moon’ which ‘thro’ every distant age has held a lamp of Wisdom’ but, this I do suspect, that my portly fat brother had been indulging himself on the tenth day of the seventh month of the year of our Lord 1827 without a proper and due regard to that charming virtue called by men, Temperance.
Women Writing Home, 1700-1920. Volume 2, Australia. Fanny Macleay to her brother, William Macleay, Sydney, 3 March 1828