THE luxury and dissipation that prevail in genteel life, as they corrupt
the heart in many respects, so they render it incapable of warm,
sincere, and steady friendship. A happy choice of friends will be of the
utmost consequence to you, as they may assist you by their advice and
good offices. But the immediate gratification which friendship affords
to a warm, open and ingenuous heart, is of itself a sufficient motive to
court it.
IN the choice of your friends, have principal regard to goodness of
heart and fidelity. If they also possess taste and genius, that will
still make them more agreeable and useful companions. You have
particular reason to place confidence in those who have shewn affection
for you in your early days, when you were incapable of making them any
return. This is an obligation for which you cannot be too grateful: When
you read this, you will naturally think of your mother’s friend, to whom
you owe so much.
IF you have the good fortune to meet with any who deserve the name of
friends, unbosom yourself to them with the most unsuspicious confidence.
It is one of the world’s maxims, never to trust any person with a
secret, the discovery of which could give you any pain; but it is the
maxim of a little mind and a cold heart, unless where it is the effect
of frequent disappointments and bad usage. An open temper, if restrained
but by tolerable prudence, will make you, on the whole, much happier
than a reserved suspicious one, although you may sometimes suffer by it.
Coldness and distrust are but the too certain consequences of age and
experience; but they are unpleasant feelings, and need not be
anticipated before their time.
BUT however open you may be in talking of your own affairs, never
disclose the secrets of one friend to another. These are sacred
deposites, which do not belong to you, nor have you any right to make
use of them.
THERE is another case, in which I suspect it is proper to be secret, not
so much from motives of prudence, as delicacy. I mean in love matters.
Though a woman has no reason to be ashamed of an attachment to a man of
merit, yet nature, whose authority is superior to philosophy, has
annexed a sense of shame to it. It is even long before a woman of
delicacy dares avow to her own heart that she loves; and when all the
subterfuges of ingenuity to conceal it from herself fail, she feels a
violence done both to her pride and to her modesty. This, I should
imagine, must always be the case where she is not sure of a return to
her attachment.
IN such a situation, to lay the heart open to any person whatever, does
not appear to me consistent with the perfection of female delicacy. But
perhaps I am in the wrong.—At the same time I must tell you, that, in
point of prudence, it concerns you to attend well to the consequences of
such a discovery. These secrets, however important in your own
estimation, may appear very trifling to your friend, who possibly will
not enter into your feelings, but may rather consider them as a subject
of pleasantry. For this reason, love-secrets are of all others the worst
kept. But the consequences to you may be very serious, as no man of
spirit and delicacy ever valued a heart much hackneyed in the ways of
love.
IF, therefore, you must have a friend to pour out your heart to, be sure
of her honour and secrecy. Let her not be a married woman, especially if
she lives happily with her husband, There are certain unguarded moments,
in which such a woman, though the best and worthiest of her sex, may let
hints escape, which at other times, or to any other person than her
husband, she would be incapable of; nor will a husband in this case feel
himself under the same obligation of secrecy and honour, as if you had
put your confidence originally in himself, especially on a subject which
the world is apt to treat so lightly.
IF all other circumstances are equal, there are obvious advantages in
your making friends of one another. The ties of blood, and your being so
much united in one common interest, form an additional bond of union to
your friendship. If your brothers should have the good fortune to have
hearts susceptible of friendship, to possess truth, honour, sense, and
delicacy of sentiment, they are the fittest and most unexceptionable
confidants. By placing confidence in them, you will receive every
advantage which you could hope for from the friendship of men, without
any of the inconveniencies that attend such connexions with our sex.
BEWARE of making confidants of your servants. Dignity not properly
understood very readily degenerates into pride, which enters into no
friendships, because it cannot bear an equal, and is so fond of flattery
as to grasp at it even from servants and dependants. The most intimate
confidants, therefore, of proud people are valets-de-chamber and waiting
women. Shew the utmost humanity to your servants; make their situation
as comfortable to them as is possible: but if you make them your
confidants, you spoil them, and debase yourselves.
NEVER allow any person, under the pretended sanction of friendship, to
be so familiar as to lose a proper respect for you. Never allow them to
tease you on any subject that is disagreeable, or where you have once
taken your resolution. Many will tell you, that this reserve is
inconsistent with the freedom which friendship allows. But a certain
respect is as necessary in friendship as in love. Without it, you may be
liked as a child, but you will never be beloved as an equal.
THE temper and dispositions of the heart in your sex make you enter more
readily and warmly into friendships than men. Your natural propensity to
it is so strong, that you often run into intimacies which you soon have
sufficient cause to repent of; and this makes your friendships so very
fluctuating.
ANOTHER great obstacle to the sincerity as well as steadiness of your
friendships is the great clashing of your interests in the pursuits of
love, ambition, or vanity. For these reasons, it should appear at first
view more eligible for you to contract your friendships with the men.
Among other obvious advantages of an easy intercourse between the two
sexes, it occasions an emulation and exertion in each to excel and be
agreeable: hence their respective excellencies are mutually communicated
and blended.—As their interests in no degree interfere, there can be no
foundation for jealousy or suspicion of rivalship. The friendship of a
man for a woman is always blended with a tenderness, which he never
feels for one of his own sex, even where love is in no degree concerned.
Besides we are conscious of a natural title you have to our protection
and good offices, and therefore we feel an additional obligation of
honour to serve you, and to observe an inviolable secrecy, whenever you
confide in us.
BUT apply these observations with great caution. Thousands of women of
the best hearts and finest parts have been ruined by men who approached
them under the specious name of friendship. But supposing a man to have
the most undoubted honour, yet his friendship to a woman is so near
a-kin to love, that if she be very agreeable in her person, she will
probably very soon find a lover, where she only wished to meet a friend.
Let me here, however, warn you against that weakness so common among
vain women, the imagination that every man who takes particular notice
of you is a lover. Nothing can expose you more to ridicule, than the
taking up a man on the suspicion of being your lover, who perhaps never
once thought of you in that view, and giving yourselves those airs so
common among silly women on such occasions.
THERE is a kind of unmeaning gallantry much practised by some men,
which, if you have any discernment, you will find really harmless. Men
of this sort will attend you to public places, and be useful to you by a
number of little observances, which those of a superior class do not so
well understand, or have not leisure to regard, or perhaps are too proud
to submit to. Look on the compliments of such men as words of course,
which they repeat to every agreeable woman of their acquaintance. There
is a familiarity they are apt to assume, which a proper dignity in your
behaviour will be easily able to check.
THERE is a different species of men whom you may like as agreeable
companions, men of worth, taste and genius, whose conversation, in some
respects, may be superior to what you generally meet with among your own
sex. It will be foolish in you to deprive yourselves of an useful and
agreeable acquaintance, merely because idle people say he is your lover.
Such a man may like your company, without having any design on your
person.
PEOPLE whose sentiments, and particularly whose tastes correspond,
naturally like to associate together, although neither of them have the
most distant view of any further connexion. But as this similarity of
minds often gives rise to a more tender attachment than friendship, it
will be prudent to keep a watchful eye over yourselves, lest your hearts
become too far engaged before you are aware of it. At the same time, I
do not think that your sex, at least in this part of the world, have
much of that sensibility which disposes to such attachments. What is
commonly called love among you is rather gratitude, and a partiality to
the man who prefers you to the rest of your sex; and such a man you
often marry, with little of either personal esteem or affection. Indeed,
without an unusual share of natural sensibility, and very peculiar good
fortune, a woman in this country has very little probability of marrying
for love.
IT is a maxim laid down among you, and a very prudent one it is. That
love is not to begin on your part, but is entirely to be the consequence
of our attachment to you. Now, supposing a woman to have sense and
taste, she will not find many men to whom she can possibly be supposed
to bear any considerable share of esteem. Among these few, it is a very
great chance if any of them distinguishes her particularly. Love, at
least with us, is exceedingly capricious, and will not always fix where
reason says it should. But supposing one of them should become
particularly attached to her, it is still extremely improbable that he
should be the man in the world her heart most approved of.
AS, therefore, Nature has not given you that unlimited range in your
choice which we enjoy, she has wisely and benevolently assigned to you a
greater flexibility of taste on this subject. Some agreeable qualities
recommend a gentleman to your common good liking and friendship. In the
course of his acquaintance, he contracts an attachment to you. When you
perceive it, it excites your gratitude; this gratitude rises into a
preference, and this preference perhaps at last advances to some degree
of attachment, especially if it meets with crosses and difficulties, for
these, and a state of suspense, are very great incitements to
attachment, and are the food of love in both sexes. If attachment was
not excited in your sex in this manner, there is not one of a million of
you that could ever marry with any degree of love.
A MAN of taste and delicacy marries a woman because he loves her more
than any other. A woman of equal taste and delicacy marries him because
she esteems him, and because he gives her that preference. But if a man
unfortunately becomes attached to a woman whose heart is secretly
pre-engaged, his attachment, instead of obtaining a suitable return, is
particularly offensive; and if he persists to teaze her, he makes
himself equally the object of her scorn and aversion.
THE effects of love among men are diversified by their different
tempers. An artful man may counterfeit every one of them so as easily to
impose on a young girl of an open, generous, and feeling heart, if she
is not extremely on her guard. The finest parts in such a girl may not
always prove sufficient for her security. The dark and crooked paths of
cunning are unsearchable, and inconceivable to an honourable and
elevated mind.
THE following, I apprehend, are the most genuine effects of an
honourable passion among the men, and the most difficult to counterfeit.
A man of delicacy often betrays his passion by his too great anxiety to
conceal it, especially if he has little hopes of success. True love, in
all its stages, seeks concealment, and never expects success. It renders
a man not only respectful, but timid to the highest degree in his
behaviour to the woman he loves. To conceal the awe he stands in of her,
he may sometimes affect pleasantry, but it sits aukwardly on him, and he
quickly relapses into seriousness, if not into dulness. He magnifies all
her real perfections in his imagination, and is either blind to her
failings, or converts them into beauties. Like a person conscious of
guilt, he is jealous that every eye observes him; and to avoid this, he
shuns all the little observances of common gallantry.
HIS heart and his character will be improved in every respect by his
attachment. His manners will become more gentle, and his conversation
more agreeable; but diffidence and embarrassment will always make him
appear to disadvantage in the company of his mistress. If the
fascination continue long, it will totally depress his spirit, and
extinguish every active, vigorous and manly principle of his mind. You
will find this subject beautifully and pathetically painted in Thomson’s
Spring.
WHEN you observe in a gentleman’s behaviour these marks which I have
described above, reflect seriously what you are to do. If his attachment
is agreeable to you, I leave you to do as nature, good sense, and
delicacy shall direct you. If you love him let me advise you never to
discover to him the full extent of your love, no not although you marry
him. That sufficiently shews your preference, which is all he is
entitled to know. If he has delicacy, he will ask for no stronger proof
of your affection for your sake; if he has sense, he will not ask it for
his own. This is an unpleasant truth, but it is my duty to let you know
it; violent love cannot subsist, at least cannot be expressed, for any
time together, on both sides; otherwise the certain consequence, however
concealed, is satiety and disgust. Nature in this case has laid the
reserve on you.
IF you see evident proofs of a gentleman’s attachment, and are
determined to shut your heart against him, as you ever hope to be used
with generosity by the person who shall engage your own heart, treat him
honourably and humanely. Do not let him linger in a miserable suspense,
but be anxious to let him know your sentiments with regard to him.
HOWEVER people’s hearts may deceive them, there is scarcely a person
that can love for any time without at least some distant hope of
success. If you really wish to undeceive a lover, you may do it in a
variety of ways. There is a certain species of easy familiarity in your
behaviour, which may satisfy him, if he has any discernment left, that
he has nothing to hope for. But perhaps your particular temper may not
admit of this.—You may easily shew that you want to avoid his company;
but if he is a man whose friendship you wish to preserve, you may not
chuse this method, because then you lose him in every capacity.—You may
get a common friend to explain matters to him, or fall on many other
devices, if you are seriously anxious to put him out of suspense.
BUT if you are resolved against every such method, at least do not shun
opportunities of letting him explain himself. If you do this, you act
barbarously and unjustly. If he brings you to an explanation, give him a
polite, but resolute and decisive answer. In whatever way you convey
your sentiments to him, if he is a man of spirit and delicacy, he will
give you no further trouble, nor apply to your friends for their
intercession. This last is a method of courtship which every man of
spirit will disdain.—He will never whine nor sue for your pity. That
would mortify him almost as much as your scorn. In short, you may
possibly break such a heart, but you cannot bend it.—Great pride always
accompanies delicacy, however concealed under the appearance of the
utmost gentleness and modesty, and is the passion of all others the most
difficult to conquer.
THERE is a case where a woman may coquette justifiably to the utmost
verge which her conscience will allow. It is where a gentleman purposely
declines to make his addresses, till such time as he thinks himself
perfectly sure of her consent. This at bottom is intended to force a
woman to give up the undoubted privilege of her sex, the privilege of
her refusing; it is intended to force her to explain herself, in effect,
before the gentleman deigns to do it, and by this mean to oblige her to
violate the modesty and delicacy of her sex, and to invert the clearest
order of nature. All this sacrifice is proposed to be made merely to
gratify a most despicable vanity in a man who would degrade the very
woman whom he wishes to make his wife.
IT is of great importance to distinguish, whether a gentleman who has
the appearance of being your lover delays to speak explicitly, from the
motive I have mentioned, or from a diffidence inseparable from true
attachment. In the one case, you can scarcely use him too ill: in the
other, you ought to use him with great kindness: and the greatest
kindness you can shew him, if you are determined not to listen to his
addresses, is to let him know it as soon as possible.
I KNOW the many excuses with which women endeavour to justify themselves
to the world, and to their own consciences, when they act otherwise.
Sometimes they plead ignorance, or at least uncertainty, of the
gentleman’s real sentiments. That may sometimes be the case. Sometimes
they plead the decorums of their sex, which enjoin an equal behaviour to
all men, and forbid them to consider any man as a lover, till he has
directly told them so.—Perhaps few women carry their ideas of female
delicacy and decorum so far as I do. But I must say, you are not
entitled to plead the obligation of these virtues, in opposition to the
superior ones of gratitude, justice, and humanity. The man is entitled
to all these, who prefers you to the rest of your sex, and perhaps whose
greatest weakness is this very preference. The truth of the matter is,
vanity, and the love of admiration, are so prevailing passions among
you, that you may be considered to make a very great sacrifice whenever
you give up a lover, till every art of coquetry fails to keep him, or
till he forces you to an explanation. You can be fond of the love, when
you are indifferent to, or even when you despise the lover.
BUT the deepest and most artful coquetry is employed by women of
superior taste and sense, to engage and fix the heart of a man whom the
world and whom they themselves esteem, although they are firmly
determined never to marry him. But his conversation amuses them, and his
attachment is the highest gratification to their vanity; nay, they can
sometimes be gratified with the utter ruin of his fortune, fame, and
happiness.—God forbid I should ever think so of all your sex. I know
many of them have principles, have generosity and dignity of soul that
elevates them above the worthless vanity I have been speaking of.
SUCH a woman, I am persuaded, may always convert a lover, if she cannot
give him her affections, into a warm and steady friend, provided he is a
man of sense, resolution, and candour. If she explains herself to him
with a generous openness and freedom, he must feel the stroke as a man;
but he will likewise bear it as a man: what he suffers he will suffer in
silence. Every sentiment of esteem will remain; but love though it
requires very little food, and is easily surfeited with too much, yet it
requires some. He will view her in the light of a married woman; and
though passion subsides, yet a man of a candid and generous heart always
retains a tenderness for a woman he has once loved, and who has used him
well, beyond what he feels for any other of her sex.
IF he has not confided his own secret to any body, he has an undoubted
title to ask you not to divulge it. If a woman chuses to trust any of
her companions with her own unfortunate attachments, she may, as it is
her own affair alone: but if she has any generosity or gratitude, she
will not betray a secret which does not belong to her.
MALE coquetry is much more inexcusable than female, as well as more
pernicious; but it is rare in this country. Very few men will give
themselves the trouble to gain or retain any woman’s affections, unless
they have views on her either of an honourable or dishonourable kind.
Men employed in the pursuits of business, ambition, or pleasure, will
not give themselves the trouble to engage a woman’s affections merely
from the vanity of conquest, and of triumphing over the heart of an
innocent and defenceless girl. Besides, people never value much what is
entirely in their power. A man of parts, sentiment, and address, if he
lays aside all regard to truth and humanity, may engage the hearts of
fifty women at the same time, and may likewise conduct his coquetry with
so much art, as to put it out of the power of any of them to specify a
single expression that could be said to be directly expressive of love.
THIS ambiguity of behaviour, this art of keeping one in suspense, is the
great secret of coquetry in both sexes. It is the more cruel in us,
because we can carry it what length we please, and continue it as long
as we please, without your being so much as at liberty to complain or
expostulate; whereas we can break our chain, and force you to explain,
whenever we become impatient of our situation.
I HAVE insisted the more particularly on this subject of courtship,
because it may most readily happen to you at that early period of life
when you can have little experience or knowledge of the world, when your
passions are warm, and your judgments not arrived at such full maturity
as to be able to correct them.—I wish you to possess such high
principles of honour and generosity as will render you incapable of
deceiving, and at the same time to possess that acute discernment which
may secure you against being deceived.
A WOMAN, in this country, may easily prevent the first impressions of
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 proof 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 can 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 there are wanting those
qualities which alone can ensure 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 is so, and the
consequent impatience to be married, is the most effectual way to
prevent it.
YOU must not 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 can possibly find in any
other. I know the forlorn and unprotected situation 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 chearfulness
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 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 girls, who might have been their
grand-children; sometimes by oppressing their acquaintances by
impertinent intrusions into their private affairs; and sometimes by
being the propagators of scandal and defamation. All this is owing to an
exuberant activity of spirit, 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 united to a
partner who has sense, and worth, and taste, to know their value; one
who is able to draw forth their concealed qualities, and shew them to
advantage; who can give that support to their feeble spirits which they
stand so much in need of; and who, by his affection and tenderness,
might make such a woman happy in exerting every talent, and
accomplishing herself in 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, and 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 advices about your conduct, I own my heart beats with
the fond hope of making you worthy the attachment of men who will
deserve you, and be sensible of your merit. But heaven forbid you should
ever relinquish the ease and independence of a single life, to become
the slaves of a fool, or a tyrant’s caprice.
AS these have been always my sentiments, I shall do you but justice,
when I leave you in such independent circumstances as may lay you under
no temptation to do from necessity what you would 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
honour or a favour when he asks you for his wife.
IF I live till you arrive at that age when you shall be capable to judge
for yourselves, and do not strangely alter my sentiments, I shall act
towards you in a very different manner from what most parents do. My
opinion has always been, that when that period arrives, the parental
authority ceases.
I HOPE I shall always treat you with that affection and easy confidence
which may dispose you to look on me as your friend. In that capacity
alone I shall think myself entitled to give you my opinion; in the doing
of which, I should think myself highly criminal, if I did not to the
utmost of my power endeavour to divest myself of all personal vanity,
and all prejudices in favour of my particular taste. If you did not
chuse to follow my advice, I should not on that account cease to love
you as my children.—Though my right to your obedience was expired, yet I
should think nothing could release me from the ties of nature and
humanity.
YOU may perhaps imagine, that the reserved behaviour 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
distinguished there by their looks and external behaviour. But it is in
private companies alone where you can expect easy and agreeable
conversation, which I should never wish you to decline. If you do not
allow gentlemen to become acquainted with you, you can never 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 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 you 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
heaven’s 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 (for 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
yourselves 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 reason I formerly mentioned; but shun as you
would do 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 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 imbitter 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 by
indifference. You will find none to compassionate, or even understand
your sufferings; 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 therefore would
look on you as unreasonable women, and that 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, except in the way of wit or humour.
I HAVE no view by these advices to lead your tastes; 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 that
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 on 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,
endeavour in the most prudent and secret manner, to procure from your
friends every necessary piece of 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 settlements of a
jointure and children’s provisions be ample, 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 pleasure, that pomp and parade of life for
which you married him.
FROM what I have said, you will easily see that I could never pretend to
advise whom you should marry; but I can with great 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 a danger, and
in my opinion, highly criminal.
DO not marry a fool; he is the most intractable 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 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 shew he dares 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 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 sakes, and for the sake of their
families; but it will sink you in their esteem. 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 endeavours to form their minds to virtue
and piety, all your endeavours 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 consequence
to your happiness, I hope you will make it with the utmost
circumspection. Do not give way to a sudden sally of passion, and
dignify it with the name of love.—Genuine love is not founded in
caprice; it is founded in nature, on honourable views, on virtue, on
similarity of tastes and sympathy of souls.
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 honour, no personal gratification will ever tempt him to
enter into any connection which will render you unhappy. If you have as
much between you as to satisfy all your reasonable demands, it is
sufficient.
I SHALL conclude with endeavouring to remove a difficulty which must
naturally occur to any woman of reflection on the subject of marriage.
What is to become of all these refinements of delicacy, that dignity of
manners, which checked all familiarities, and suspended desire in
respectful and awful admiration? In answer to this, I shall only
observe, that if motives of interest or vanity have had 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 did in the eyes of your husbands. They
have been sentiments which have floated in your imaginations, but have
never reached your hearts. But if these sentiments have been truly
genuine, and if you have had the singular happy fate to attach those who
understand them, you have no reason to be afraid.
MARRIAGE indeed, will at once dispel the enchantment raised by external
beauty; but the virtues and graces that first warmed the heart, that
reserve and delicacy which always left the lover something further to
wish, and often made him doubtful of your sensibility or attachment, may
and ought ever to remain. The tumult of passion will necessarily
subside; but it will be succeeded by an endearment, that affects the
heart in a more equal, more sensible, and tender manner.—But I must
check myself, and not indulge in descriptions that may mislead you, and
that too sensibly awake the remembrance of my happier days, which,
perhaps, it were better for me to forget forever.
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. I have endeavoured to avoid some peculiarities
of opinion, which, from their contradiction to the general practice of
the world, I might reasonably have suspected were not so well founded.
But in writing to you, I am afraid 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 melancholy 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.