YOU had the misfortune to be deprived of your mother, at a time of life
when you were insensible of your loss, and could receive little benefit,
either from her instruction, or her example. Before this comes to your
hands, you will likewise have lost your father.
I HAVE had many melancholy reflections on the forlorn and helpless
situation you must be in, if it should please God to remove me from you
before you arrive at that period of life, when you will be able to think
and act for yourselves. I know mankind too well. I know their falsehood,
their dissipation, their coldness to all the duties of friendship and
humanity. I know the little attention paid to helpless infancy. You will
meet with few friends disinterested enough to do you good offices, when
you are incapable of making them any return, by contributing to their
interest or their pleasure, or to the gratification of their vanity.
I HAVE been supported under the gloom naturally arising from these
reflections, by a reliance on the goodness of that Providence which has
hitherto preferred you, and given me the most pleasing prospect of the
goodness of your dispositions; and by the secret hope, that your
mother’s virtues will entail a blessing on her children.
THE anxiety I have for your happiness has made me resolve to throw
together my sentiments, relating to your future conduct in life. If I
live for some years, you will receive them with much greater advantage,
suited to your different geniuses and dispositions. If I die sooner, you
must receive them in this very imperfect manner,—the last proof of my
affection.
YOU will all remember your father’s fondness, when perhaps every other
circumstance relating to him is forgotten. This remembrance, I hope,
will induce you to give a serious attention to the advices I am now
going to leave with you.—I can request this attention with the greater
confidence, as my sentiments on the most interesting points that regard
life and manners, were entirely correspondent to your mother’s, whose
judgment and taste I trusted much more than my own.
YOU must expect that the advice which I shall give you will be very
imperfect, as there are many nameless delicacies, in female manners, of
which none but a woman can judge.
YOU will have one advantage by attending to what I am going to leave
with you; you will hear, at least for once in your lives, the genuine
sentiments of a man, who has no interest in flattering or deceiving
you.—I shall throw my reflections together without any studied order,
and shall only, to avoid confusion range them under a few general heads.
YOU will see, in a little treatise of mine just published, in what an
honourable point of view I have considered your sex; not as domestic
drudges, or the slaves of our pleasures, but as our companions and
equals; as designed to soften our hearts and polish our manners; and as
Thomson finely says,
_To raise the virtues, animate the bliss,
And sweeten all the toils of human life._
I shall not repeat what I have there said on this subject, and shall
only observe, that from the view I have given of your natural character
and place in society, there arises a certain propriety of conduct
peculiar to your sex. It is this peculiar propriety of female manners of
which I intend to give you my sentiments, without touching on those
general rules of conduct by which men and women are equally bound.
WHILE I explain to you that system of conduct which I think will tend
most to your honour and happiness, I shall, at the same time, endeavour
to point out those virtues and accomplishment which render you most
respectable and most amiable in the eyes of my own sex.