Letter to Mrs Ourry September 1791 'Clanship, doubtless, narrows the affections, and produces many absurd and unpleasing associations; yet it is better to love forty or fifty people warmly and exclusively on absurd grounds, than to love nobody at all; and then pretend to love all the world (which does not care a straw for you, as the Parisian philosophers do, on whom the demons of scepticism and discord will soon visit all the mischiefs they are doing, and far greater mischiefs they occasion). My poor dear Odyssey tells a fine story of Aeolus having the winds in a bag, and what havoc followed when they were unskilfully let out. Now, I think popular writers possess bags, in which those winds are contained that blow the embers of discontent into flames of destruction ?.'