Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Richardson

Youth, in Richardson's view, isn't virtue; it's leverage. The line turns "good-natured" into a kind of social weather report, forecasting pleasantness when circumstances are favorable. Between sixteen and twenty, women are "kept in humor" not by innate sweetness but by two forces that make the world treat them gently: "hopes" (marriage prospects, security, upward mobility) and "attractions" (the currency that commands attention in a marketplace that appraises them first as desirable, only second as fully human). It's an almost clinical formulation, and the coolness is the point. Richardson is letting you see the machinery.

The subtext is less about women than about the conditions that produce agreeableness. "Kept" carries the sting: mood as something managed by external incentives, like a pet soothed with treats. That framing reflects an 18th-century moral economy where young women were expected to be pleasing, modest, and compliant because their future depended on being chosen. When the horizon is bright and the doors are open, good humor looks effortless. The implied afterimage is harsher: what happens when hopes fade, when "attractions" no longer buy patience from men, family, or society? If sweetness is partly situational, then sourness becomes legible as a response to shrinking options, not a personal defect.

As a novelist steeped in courtship plots and social surveillance, Richardson isn't merely making a sexist joke; he's sketching a system. He offers a cynical insight disguised as common sense: behavior often tracks power. The line works because it flatters the reader with worldly knowingness while quietly indicting the world that makes "good nature" a survival strategy.