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love, and every motive of prudence and delicacy should make her guard her heart against them, till such time as she has received the most convincing proofs of the attachment of a man of such merit as will justify a reciprocal regard. Your hearts indeed may be shut inflexibly and permanently against all the merit a man may possess. That may be your misfortune, but cannot be your fault. In such a situation, you would be equally unjust to yourself and your lover, if you gave him your hand when your heart revolted against him. But miserable will be your fate if you allow an attachment to steal on you before you are sure of a return; or what is infinitely worse, where are wanting those qualities which alone can insure happiness in a married state.

I know nothing that renders a woman more despicable than her thinking it essential to happiness to be married! Besides the gross indelicacy of the sentiment, it is a false one, as thousands of women have experienced. But, if it was true, the belief that it was so, and the consequent impatience to be married, is the most effectual way to prevent it.

You must think from this that I do not wish you to marry. On the contrary, I am of opinion that you may attain a superior degree of happiness in a married state to what you may perhaps find in any other. I know the forlorn and unprotected state of an old maid, the chagrin and peevishness which are apt to infect their tempers, and the great difficulty of making a transition with dignity and cheerfulness, from the period of youth, beauty, admiration, and respect, into the calm, silent, unnoticed retreat of declining years.

I see some unmarried women, of active, vigorous minds, and of great vivacity of spirits, degrading themselves; sometimes by entering into a dissipated course of life unsuitable to their years, and exposing themselves to the ridicule of the girls, who might have been their granchildren; sometimes by oppressing their acquaintances by impertinent intrusions into their private affairs; and sometimes by being propagators of scandal and defamation. All this is owing to an exuberant activity of spirits, which, if it had found employment at home, would have rendered them respectable and useful members of society.

I see other women in the same situation, gentle, modest, blessed with sense, taste, delicacy, and every milder feminine virtue of the heart, but of weak spirits, bashful and timid; I see such women sinking into obscurity and insignificance, and gradually losing every elegant accomplishment, for this evident reason, that they are not with a partner who has sense, worth, and taste, to know their value; one who is able to draw forth their concealed qualities, and show them to advantage; who can give that support to their feeble spirits, which they stand in so much need of; and who by his affection and tenderness might make such a woman happy in exerting every elegant art, that could contribute to his amusement.

In short, I am of opinion, that a married state, if entered into from proper motives of esteem and affection, will be the happiest for yourselves, make you most respectable in the eyes of the world, and the most useful members of society. But I confess I am not enough of a patriot to wish you to marry for the good of the public. I wish you to

marry for no other reason but to make yourselves happier. When I am so particular in my advice about your conduct, I own my heart beats with the fond hopes 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 weman of spirit, the suspicion that a gentlman thinks he does you an honor or a favor when he asks you for his wife.

LETTER 146.

I am, &c.

From a Father to his Daughters, on Marriage.

DEAR DAUGHTERS, You may perhaps imagine that the reserved behavior which I recommend to you, and your appearing but 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 distinguished there by their looks and external, behavior. 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 allów gentlemen to become acquainted with you, you never can expect to marry with attachment on either side. Love is very seldom 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 particlar attention. Before your affections come to be in the least engaged to any man, examine your tempers, your taste, 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 consider 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 inconveniencies attending the state of an old maid, which I formerly pointed out-then 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 abso

lutely 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 dullness, 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 hap, py, 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 khow 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 all 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 naturcd, generous man, who despises money, and who will let you live where you can best enjoy that pleasure, 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, madIt is the height of imprudence to run into such danger, and, in my opinion, highly criminal."

ness.

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 they are weak men, they will be continually teazing and shocking you about your principles. If you have children, you will suffer the most bitter distress in seeing all your endeavors to form their minds to virtue and piety, all your endeavors to secure their present and eternal happiness, frustrated and turned into ridicule.

As I look on your choice of a husband to be of the greatest conse quence to your happiness, I hope you will make it with the utmost circumspection. Do not give way to a sudden sally of passion, and digni fy it with the name of love. Genuine love is not founded in caprice; it is founded in nature, on honorable views and virtues, on similarity of taste and sympathy of soul. If you have these sentiments, you will never marry any one when you are not in that situation, in point of fortune, which is necessary to the happiness of either of you. What that competency may be can only be determined by your own tastes.It would be ungenerous in you to take advantage of a lover's attachment to plunge him into distress; and if he has any honor, no personal gratification will ever tempt him to enter into any connexion which will render you unhappy. If you have as much between you as will satisfy all your demands, it is sufficient. I shall conclude with endeavoring to remove a difficulty which must occur to any woman of reflection, on the subject of marriage.

What is to become of all those refinements of delicacy, that dignity of manner which checked all familiarities, and suspended desire in re spectful and awful admiration? In answer to this I shall only observe, that if motives of interest or vanity have any share in your resolutions

to marry, none of these chimerical notions will give you any pain; nay, they will very quickly appear as ridiculous in your own eyes, as they probably always do in the eyes of your husband. They have been sentiments which floated in your imaginations, but have never reached your hearts. But if these sentiments have been truly genuine, and if you have had the singularly happy fate to attach those who understand them, you have no reason to be afraid.

I have thus given you my opinion on some of the most important articles of your future life, chiefly calculated for that period when you are just entering the world. But in writing to you I am afaid my heart has been too full and too warmly interested to allow me to keep this resolution. This may have produced some embarrassment, and some seeming contradictions. What I have written has been the amusement of some solitary hours, and has served to divert some melancholly reflections. I am conscious I undertook a task to which I was very unequal; but I have discharged a part of my duty. You will at least be pleased with it, as the last mark of your father's love and attention. I am your affectionate father.

PART IV.

LETTERS ON FRIENDSHIP.

LETTER 148.

The following Letter on Friendship was written by a Gentleman lately deceased, and found amongst his papers.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

It was a strange notion of Paschal, that he would never admit any man to a share of his friendship. Had that great man been a misanthrope, or an enemy to his fellow creatures, I should not have been much surprised; but as his love to mankind extended as far as either his knowledge or influence, it is necessary to consider his reasons for a conduct apparently so strange. Paschal had such elevated notions of the Deity on the one hand, and so low an opinion of human nature on the other, that he thought if he placed his affections on any created being it would be a sort of insult to the Creator, and a robbing him of that worship which was due to him alone. But whatever were the notions of that great man, yet there is such a thing as real friendship, and there is also a necessity for it. It is true, indeed, that God is our only friend, and that on him our affections ought principally to be fixed. But those who are acquainted with human nature well know that we are such a composition of flesh and spirit, that however we may wish to keep up an

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