Social Vulnerability to Disasters 2nd Thomas Solution Manual
Social Vulnerability to Disasters 2nd Thomas Solution Manual
Social Vulnerability to Disasters 2nd Thomas Solution Manual
Social Vulnerability to Disasters 2nd Thomas Solution Manual
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17. FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, MARRIAGE.
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
18. 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.
19. 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
20. 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
21. 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.
22. 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
23. 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
24. 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
25. 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
26. 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
27. 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
28. 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.
29. 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.
30. 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
31. 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
32. 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.
33. 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
34. 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
35. 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.
THE END.
37. CONTENTS.
page
Modesty, 7
Lying, 12
Good-Breeding, 15
Genteel Carriage, 21
Cleanliness of person, 25
Dress, 26
Elegance of Expression, 28
Address Phraseology,
and small-talk,
33
Observation, 35
Absence of Mind, 37
Knowledge of the World, 39
Choice of Company, 51
Laughter, 55
Sundry Little
Accomplishments,
57
Employment of Time, 71
Dignity of Manners, 74
Rules for Conversation, 79
A Father’s address to his
Daughters,
93
39. Transcriber’s Notes:
Missing or obscured punctuation was silently
corrected.
Typographical errors were silently corrected.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were
made consistent only when a predominant
form was found in this book.
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