to domestic life, an attention to its oeconomies, and a cultivated
understanding. Here, any thing like house-wifery is not expected but
from the lower classes, and reading or information is confined chiefly to
professed wits. Yet the qualities so much esteemed in England are not
the effect of education: few domestic accomplishments, and little useful
knowledge, are acquired at a boarding-school; but finally the national
character asserts its empire, and the female who has gone through a
course of frivolities from six to sixteen, who has been taught that the
first "human principle" should be to give an elegant tournure to her
person, after a few years' dissipation, becomes a good wife and mother,
and a rational companion.

In France, young women are kept in great seclusion: religion and oeconomy
form a principal part of conventual acquirements, and the natural vanity
of the sex is left to develope itself without the aid of authority, or
instillation by precept--yet, when released from this sober tuition,
manners take the ascendant here as in England, and a woman commences at
her marriage the aera of coquetry, idleness, freedom, and rouge.--We may
therefore, I think, venture to conclude, that the education of a
boarding-school is better calculated for the rich, that of a convent for
the middle classes and the poor; and, consequently, that the suppression
of this last in France will principally affect those to whom it was most
beneficial, and to whom the want of it will be most dangerous.

A committee of wise men are now forming a plan of public instruction,
which is to excel every thing ever adopted in any age or country; and we
may therefore hope that the defects which have hitherto prevailed, both
in theirs and our own, will be remedied. All we have to apprehend is,
that, amidst so many wise heads, more than one wise plan may be produced,
and a difficulty of choice keep the rising generation in a sort of
abeyance, so that they must remain sterile, or may become vitiated, while
it is determining in what manner they shall be cultivated.

It is almost a phrase to say, the resources of France are wonderful, and
this is no less true than generally admitted. Whatever be the want or
loss, it is no sooner known than supplied, and the imagination of the
legislature seems to become fertile in proportion to the exigence of the
moment.--I was in some pain at the disgrace of Mirabeau, lest this new
kind of retrospective judgeme