sort,
they have evidently far more brutishness is immeasurably rarer there;
but in individual characters of the highest form, we are nothing indebted
to them. If I should carry on the comparison, I might say, as touching
valour, that, on the contrary, it is, to what it is with them, common and
natural with us; but sometimes we see them possessed of it to such a
degree as surpasses the greatest examples we can produce: The marriages
of that country are defective in this; their custom commonly imposes so
rude and so slavish a law upon the women, that the most distant
acquaintance with a stranger is as capital an offence as the most
intimate; so that all approaches being rendered necessarily substantial,
and seeing that all comes to one account, they have no hard choice to
make; and when they have broken down the fence, we may safely presume
they get on fire:

"Luxuria ipsis vinculis, sicut fera bestia,
irritata, deinde emissa."

["Lust, like a wild beast, being more excited by being bound,
breaks from his chains with greater wildness."--Livy, xxxiv. 4.]

They must give them a little more rein:

"Vidi ego nuper equum, contra sua frena tenacem,
Ore reluctanti fulminis ire modo":

["I saw, the other day, a horse struggling against his bit,
rush like a thunderbolt."--Ovid, Amor., iii. 4, 13.]

the desire of company is allayed by giving it a little liberty. We are
pretty much in the same case they are extreme in constraint, we in
licence. 'Tis a good custom we have in France that our sons are received
into the best families, there to be entertained and bred up pages, as in
a school of nobility; and 'tis looked upon as a discourtesy and an
affront to refuse this to a gentleman. I have taken notice (for, so many
families, so many differing forms) that the ladies who have been
strictest with their maids have had no better luck than those who allowed
them a greater liberty. There should be moderation in these things; one
must leave a great deal of their conduct to their own discretion; for,
when all comes to all, no discipline can curb them throughout. But it is
true withal that she who comes off with flying colours from a school of
liberty, brings with her whereon to repose more confidence than she who
comes away sound from a severe and strict school.

Our fathers dressed up their daughters' looks in bashfulness and fear
(their courage and desires being the