world, and this is a
flippant literary lady, who talks in raptures of the Greeks and Romans,
calls Rousseau familiarly Jean Jaques, frisks through the whole circle of
science at the Lyceum, and has an utter contempt both for personal
neatness and domestic oeconomy. How would Madame de Sevigne wonder,
could she behold one of these modern belles esprits, with which her
country, as well as England, abounds? In our zeal for reforming the
irregular orthography and housewifely penmanship of the last century, we
are all become readers, and authors, and critics. I do not assert, that
the female mind is too much cultivated, but that it is too generally so;
and that we encourage a taste for attainments not always compatible with
the duties and occupations of domestic life. No age has, I believe,
produced so many literary ladies as the present;* yet I cannot learn that
we are at all improved in morals, or that domestic happiness is more
universal than when, instead of writing sonnets to dew-drops or
daisies,** we copied prayers and recipes, in spelling similar to that of
Stowe or Hollingshed.

* Let me not be supposed to undervalue the female authors of the
present day. There are some who, uniting great talents with
personal worth, are justly entitled to our respect and admiration.
The authoress of "Cecilia," or the Miss Lees, cannot be confounded
with the proprietors of all the Castles, Forests, Groves, Woods,
Cottages, and Caverns, which are so alluring in the catalogue of a
circulating library.

** Mrs. Smith's beautiful Sonnets have produced sonnetteers for
every object in nature, visible or invisible; and her elegant
translations of Petrarch have procured the Italian bard many an
English dress that he would have been ashamed to appear in.

--We seem industrious to make every branch of education a vehicle for
inspiring a premature taste for literary amusements; and our old
fashioned moral adages in writing-books are replaced by scraps from
"Elegant Extracts," while print-work and embroidery represent scenes from
poems or novels. I allow, that the subjects formerly pourtrayed by the
needle were not pictoresque, yet, the tendency considered, young ladies
might as well employ their silk or pencils in exhibiting Daniel in the
lions' den, or Joseph and his brethren, as Sterne's Maria, or Charlotte
and Werter.

You will forgive this digression, which I have been led in