in active charity, and affording assistance, protection, or consolation to every species of distress within its reach; it is an evidence that the feeling is of a spurious kind, and, instead of being nourished as an amiable tenderness, it should be subdued as a fond and base self-love.

That idleness, to whose cruel inroads many women of fortune are unhappily exposed, from not having been trained to consider wholesome occupation, vigorous exertion, and systematic employment, as making part of the indispensable duties and pleasures of life, lays them open to a thousand evils of this kind, from which the useful and the busy are exempted; and, perhaps, it would not be easy to find a more pitiable object than a woman with a great deal of time and a great deal of money on her hands, who, never having been taught the conscientious use of either, squanders both at random, or rather moulders both away, without plan, without principle, and without pleasure: all whose projects begin and terminate in self; who considers the rest of the world only as they may be subservient to her gratification; and to whom it never occurred, that both her time and money were given for the gratification and good of others.

It is not much to the credit of the other sex, that they now and then lend themselves to the indulgence of this selfish spirit in their wives, and cherish by a kind of false fondness those faults which should be combated by good sense and a reasonable counteraction; slothfully preferring a little false peace, the purchase of precarious quiet, and the popular reputation of good-nature, to the higher duty of forming the mind, fixing the principles, and strengthening the character of her with whom they are connected. Perhaps, too, a little vanity in the husband helps out his good-nature; he secretly rewards himself for his sacrifice by the conscious

ness of his superiority; he feels a self-complacency in his patient condescension to her weakness, which tacitly flatters his own strength; and he is, as it were, paid for stooping, by the increased sense of his own tallness. Seeing also, perhaps, but little of other women, he is taught to believe that they are all pretty much alike, and that, as a man of sense, he must content himself with what he takes to be the common lot. Whereas, in truth, by his misplaced indulgence, he has rather made his own lot than drawn it; and thus, through an indolent despair in the husband, of being able to effect any amendment by opposition, and through the want of that sound affection which labours to improve and exalt the character of its object; it happens, that many a helpless, fretful, and daudling wife acquires a more powerful ascendency than the most discreet and amiable woman; and that the most absolute female tyranny is established by these sickly and capricious humours.

The poets again, who, to do them justice, are always ready to lend a helping hand when any mischief is to be done, have contributed their full share towards confirming these feminine follies: they have strengthened by adulatory maxims, sung in seducing strains, those faults which their talents and their influence should have been employed in correcting. By fair and youthful females an argument, drawn from sound experience and real life, is commonly repelled by a stanza or a sonnet; and a couplet is considered as nearly of the same validity with a text. When ladies are complimented with being Fine by defect, and delicately weak!

is not a standard of feebleness held out to them, to which vanity will gladly resort, and to which softness and indolence can easily act up, or rather act down, if I may be allowed the expression?

When ladies are told by the same misleading, but to them high, authority, that "smiles and tears are the irresistible arms with which nature has furnished the weak for conquering the strong," will they not eagerly fly to this cheap and ready artillery, instead of labouring to furnish themselves with a reasonable mind, an equable temper, and a meek and quiet spirit?

Every animal is endowed by providence with the peculiar powers adapted to its nature and its wants; while none, except the human, by grafting art on natural sagacity, injures or mars the gift. Spoilt women, who fancy there is something more piquant and alluring in the mutable graces of caprice, than in the monotonous smoothness of an even temper; and who also having heard much, as was observed before, about their "amiable weakness," learn to look about them for the best succedaneum to strength, the supposed absence of which they sometimes endeavour to supply by artifice. By this engine, the weakest woman frequently furnishes the converse to the famous reply of the French minister, who, when he was accused of governing the mind of that feeble queen, Mary de Medicis, by sorcery, replied, "that the only sorcery he had used, was that influence which strong minds naturally have over weak ones."

But though it be fair so to study the tempers, defects, and weaknesses of others, as to convert our knowledge of them to the promotion of their benefit and our own; and though it be making a lawful use of our penetration to avail ourselves of others for "their good to edification;" yet all deviations from the straight line of truth and simplicity, every plot insidiously to turn influence to unfair account, all contrivances to extort from a bribed complaisance what reason and justice would refuse to our wishes; these are some of the ope

rations of that lowest and most despicable engine, selfish cunning, by which little minds sometimes govern great ones.

And, unfortunately, women, from their natural desire to please, and from their sometimes doubting by what means this grand end may be best effected, are in more danger of being led into dissimulation than men; for dissimulation is the result of weakness; it is the refuge of doubt and distrust, rather than of conscious strength, the dangers of which lie another way. Frankness, truth, and simplicity, therefore, as they are inexpressibly charming, so are they peculiarly commendable, in women; and nobly evil.ce that while the possessors of them wish to please, (and why should they not wish it?) they disdain to have recourse to any thing but what is fair and just and honourable, to effect it; that they scorn to attain the most desired end by any but the most lawful means. The beauty of simplicity is indeed so intimately felt and generally acknowledged by all who have a true taste for personal, moral, or intellectual beauty, that women of the deepest dissimulation often find their account in assuming an exterior the most foreign to their character, and exhibiting the most engaging naïveté. It is curious to see how much art they put in practice in order to appear natural; and the deep design which is set at work to display simplicity. And indeed this feigned simplicity is the most mischievous, because the most engaging of all the Proteus forms which artifice can put on. For the most free and bold sentiments have been sometimes hazarded with fatal success under this unsuspected mask. And an innocent, quiet, indolent, artless manner has been adopted as the most refined and successful accompaniment of sentiments, ideas, and designs, neither artless, quiet, nor innocent.

CHAPTER XVII.

On dissipation, and the modern habits of fashionable life.

PERHAPS the interests of true friendship, elegant conversation, mental improvement, social pleasure, maternal duty, and conjugal comfort, never received such a blow as when fashion issued out that arbi

trary and universal decree, that " every body must be acquainted with every body; together with that consequent, authoritative, but rather inconvenient clause, that " every body must also go every where every night." The implicit and devout obedience paid to this law is incompatible with the very being of friendship; for as the circle of acquaintance expands, and it will be continually expanding, the affections will be beaten out into such thin lamina as to leave little solidity remaining. The heart which is continually exhausting itself in professions grows cold and hard. The feelings of kindness diminish in proportion as the expression of it becomes more diffuse and indiscriminate. The very traces of "simplicity and godly sincerity," in a delicate female, wear away imperceptibly by constant collision with the world at large. And perhaps no woman takes so little interest in the happiness of her real friends, as she whose affections are incessantly evaporating in universal civilities; as she who is saying fond and flattering things at random to a circle of five hundred people every night.

The decline and fall of animated and instructive conversation has been in a good measure effected by this barbarous project of assembling en masse. An excellent prelate, with whose friendship the author was long honoured, and who himself excelled * The late Bishop Horne.