ch is compounded of
irregular passions, and artificially refined by books of unnatural
fiction and improbable adventure. I will even go so far as to assert,
that a young woman cannot have any real greatness of soul, or true
elevation of principle, if she has not a tincture of what the vulgar
would call Romance, but which persons of a certain way of thinking will
discern to proceed from those fine feelings, and that charming
sensibility, without which, though a woman may be worthy, yet she can
never be amiable.

BUT this dangerous merit cannot be too rigidly watched, as it is very
apt to lead those who possess it into inconveniencies from which less
interesting characters are happily exempt. Young women of strong
sensibility may be carried by the very amiableness of this temper into
the most alarming extremes. Their tastes are passions. They love and
hate with all their hearts, and scarcely suffer themselves to feel a
reasonable preference before it strengthens into a violent attachment.

WHEN an innocent girl of this open, trusting, tender heart, happens to
meet with one of her own sex and age, whose address and manners are
engaging, she is instantly seized with an ardent desire to commence a
friendship with her. She feels the most lively impatience at the
restraints of company, and the decorums of ceremony. She longs to be
alone with her, longs to assure her of the warmth of her tenderness,
and generously ascribes to the fair stranger all the good qualities she
feels in her own heart, or rather all those which she has met with in
her reading, dispersed in a variety of heroines. She is persuaded, that
her new friend unites them all in herself, because she carries in her
prepossessing countenance the promise of them all. How cruel and how
censorious would this inexperienced girl think her mother was, who
should venture to hint, that the agreeable unknown had defects in her
temper, or exceptions in her character. She would mistake these hints of
discretion for the insinuations of an uncharitable disposition. At first
she would perhaps listen to them with a generous impatience, and
afterwards with a cold and silent disdain. She would despise them as the
effect of prejudice, misrepresentation, or ignorance. The more
aggravated the censure, the more vehemently would she protest in secret,
that her friendship for this dear injured creature (who is raised much
higher in her esteem by such injurious suspicions) shall know no b