_want_ of ardent feeling. But the _licentious_ never _love_. Their
passion is chiefly animal. Even better women, if they possess light and
frivolous minds, have seldom any ardent passion.

I would not, however, recommend that you should be too severe in
judging, when the conduct does not go beyond mere _levity_, and is not
bordering on _loose_ conduct; for something certainly depends here on
constitution and animal spirits, and something on the manners of the
country.

If any person imagine that the sobriety I have been recommending would
render young women moping or gloomy, he is much mistaken, for the
contrary is the fact. I have uniformly found--and I began to observe it
in my very childhood--that your jovial souls, men or women, except when
over the bottle, are of all human beings the most dull and insipid.
They can no more exist--they may _vegetate_--but they can no more
_live_ without some excitement, than a fish could live on the top of
the Alleghany. If it be not the excitement of the bottle, it must be
that of the tea or the coffee cup, or food converted into some
unwholesome form or other by condiments; or if it be none of these,
they must have some excitement of the intellect, for intemperance is
not confined to the use of condiments and poisons for the body; there
are condiments and poisons to mind and heart. In fact, they usually
accompany each other.

Show me a person who cannot live on plain and simple food and the only
drink the Creator ever made, and as a general rule you will show me a
person to whom the plain and the solid and the useful in domestic,
social, intellectual, and moral life are insipid if not disgusting.
'They are welcome to all that sort of labor,' said one of these
creatures--not rationals--this very day, to me, in relation to plain
domestic employments.--Show me a female, as many, alas! very many in
fashionable life are now trained, and you show me a person who has none
of the qualities that fit her to be a help meet for man in a life of
simplicity. She could recite well at the high school, no doubt; but the
moment she leaves school, she has nothing to do, and is taught to do
nothing. I have seen girls, of this description, and they may be seen
by others.

But what is such a female--one who can hardly help herself--good for,
at home or abroad; married, or single? The moment she has not some
feast, or party, or play, or novel, or--I know not what--something to
keep up a fever, the