fond hope of making you worthy the attachment of men who will deserve you, and be sensible of your merit. But I sincerely hope you will never relinquish the ease and independence of a single life, to become the slaves of a fool or tyrant's caprice.

As these have always been my sentiments, I shall do you but justice, when I wish you in such independent circumstances as may lay you under no temptation to do from necessity, what you will never do from choice. This will likewise save you from that cruel mortification to a woman of spirit, the suspicion that a gentleman thinks he does you an honor or a favor, when he asks you for his wife.

I am, &c.

LETTER 146.

From a Father to his Daughters, on Marriage.

DEAR DAUGHTERS,

You may perhaps imagine, that the reserved be haviour which I recommend to you, and your appearing seldom at public places, must cut off all opportunities of your being acquainted with gentlemen. I am very far from intending this; I advise you to no reserve but what will render you more respected and beloved by our sex. I do not think public places suited to make people acquainted together. They can only be distin guished there by their looks and external behaviour. But it is in private companies alone where you can expect easy and agreeable conversation, which I shall never wish you to decline. If you do not allow gentlemen to become acquainted with you, you never can expect to marry with attachment on either side-Love is very sel

dom produced at first sight; at least it must have, in that case, a very unjustifiable foundation. True love is founded on esteem, in a correspondence of tastes and sentiments, and steals on the heart imperceptibly.

There is one piece of advice I shall leave you, to which I beg your particular attention. Before your affections come to be in the least engaged to any man, examine your tempers, your tastes, and your hearts very severely; and settle in your own minds, what are the requisites to your happiness in a married state; and as it is almost impossible that you should get every thing to your wish, come to a steady determination what you are to consid er as essential; and what may be sacrificed.

If you have hearts disposed by nature for love and friendship, and possess those feelings which enable you to enter into all the refinements and delicacies of these attachments, consider well, for your own sake, and as you value your future happiness, before you give them any indulgence. If you have the misfortune (for a very great misfortune it commonly is to your sex) to have such a temper and such sentiments deeply rooted in you; if you have spirit and resolution to resist the solicitations of vanity, the persecution of friends, (you will have lost the only friend that would never persecute you) and can support the prospect of the many inconveniences attending the state of an old maid, which I formerly pointed outthen you may indulge yourself in that kind of sentimental reading and conversation which is most correspondent to your feelings.

But if you find, on a strict self-examination, that marriage is absolutely essential to your happiness, keep the secret inviolable in your own bosoms, for the reasons I formerly mentioned: but shun, as you would the most

fatal poison, all that species of reading and conversation which warms the imagination, which engages and softens the heart, and raises the taste above the level of common life. If you do otherwise, consider the terrible conflict of passions which this may afterwards raise in your breasts.

If this refinement once takes deep root in your minds, and you do not obey its dictates, but marry from vulgar and mercenary views, you may never be able to eradicate it entirely; and then it will embitter all your married days. Instead of meeting with sense, delicacy, tenderness, a lover, a friend, an equal companion, in a husband, you may be tired with insipidity and dulness; shocked with indelicacy, or mortified with indifference. You will find none to compassionate or even understand your sufferance; for your husbands may not use you cruelly, and may give you as much money for your clothes, personal expense, and domestic necessaries, as is suitable to their fortunes; the world would therefore look upon you as unreasonable women, who did not deserve to be happy, if you were not so. To avoid these complicated evils, if you are determined at all events to marry, I would advise you to make all your reading and amusements of such a kind as do not affect the heart, nor the imagination.

I have no view by these advices to lead your taste; I only want to persuade you of the necessity of knowing your own minds, which, though seemingly very easy, is what your sex seldom attain on many important occasions in life, but particularly on this of which I am speaking. There is not a quality I more anxiously wish you to possess, than a collected decisive spirit which rests on itself, which enables you to see where your true happiness lies,

and to pursue it with the most determined resolution. In matters of business, follow the advice of those who know them better than yourselves, and in whose integrity you can confide; but, in matters of taste, that depend upon your own feelings, consult no one friend whatever, but consult your own hearts.

If a gentleman makes his addresses to you, or gives you reason to believe he will do so, before you allow your affections to be engaged, endeavor, in the most prudent and secret manner, to procure from your friends every necessary information concerning him; such as his character for sense, his morals, his temper, fortune and family; whether it is distinguished for parts and worth, or for folly, knavery, and loathsome hereditary diseases. When your friends inform you of these, they have fulfilled their duty. If they go further, they have not that deference for you which a becoming dignity on your part would effectually command. Whatever your views are in marrying, take every possible precaution to prevent their being disappointed. If fortune and the pleasures it brings are your aim, it is not sufficient that the settlement of a jointure and children's provisions be amply and properly secured; it is necessary that you should enjoy the fortune during your own life. The principal security you can have for this will depend on your marrying a good natured, generous man, who despises money, and who will let you live where you can best enjoy that pleas ure, that pomp, and parade of life, for which you married him.

I am, &c.

LETTER 147.

From the same to the same, on the foregoing subject.

DEAR DAUGHTERS,

From what I wrote in my last, you will easily see that I could never pretend to advise whom you should marry; but I can with confidence advise whom you should not marry.

Avoid a companion that may entail any hereditary disease on your posterity; particularly, that most dreadful of all human calamities, madness. It is the height of imprudence to run into such danger, and, in my opinion, highly criminal.

Do not marry a fool; he is the most untractable of all animals; he is led by his passions and caprices, and is incapable of hearing the voice of reason. It may probably too hurt your vanity to have husbands for whom you have reason to blush and tremble, every time they open their lips in company. But the worst circumstance that attends a fool is, his constant jealousy of his wife's being thought to govern him. This renders it impossible to lead him, and he is continually doing absurd and disagreeable things, for no other reason but to show he dares to do them.

A rake is always a suspicious husband, because he has only known the most worthless of your sex. He likewise entails the worst of diseases on his wife and children, if he has the misfortune to have any.

If you have a sense of religion yourselves, do not think of husbands who have none. If they have tolerable understandings, they will be glad that you have religion, for their own sake, and for the sake of their families. If