risome confinement
which they endured at school. Not allowed, perhaps, to step
out of one broad path in a superb garden, and obliged to
pace, with steady deportment, stupidly backward and forward,
holding up their heads and turning out their toes, with
shoulders braced back, instead of bounding forward, as
Nature directs to complete her own design, in the various
attitudes so conducive to health. The pure animal spirits,
which make both mind and body shoot out and unfold the
tender blossoms of hope, are turned sour and vented in vain
wishes or pert repinings, that contract the faculties and.
spoil the temper; else they mount to the brain, and,
sharpening the understanding before it gains proportionable
strength, produce that pitiful cunning which disgracefully
characterizes the female mind,--and, I fear, will ever
characterize it while women remain the slaves of power."

In the spirit of this book Theodosia's education was conducted. Her
mind had fair play. Her father took it for granted that she could
learn what a boy of the same age could learn, and gave her precisely
the advantages which he would have given a son. Besides the usual
accomplishments, French, music, dancing, and riding, she learned to
read Virgil, Horace, Terence, Lucian, Homer, in the original. She
appears to have read all of Terence and Lucian, a great part of
Horace, all the Iliad, and large portions of the Odyssey. "Cursed
effects," exclaimed her father once,

"of fashionable education, of which both sexes are the
advocates, and yours eminently the victims. If I could
foresee that Theo would become a mere fashionable woman,
with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind,
adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would
earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence. But I yet
hope by her to convince the world what neither sex appears
to believe, that women have souls."

How faithfully, how skilfully he labored to kindle and nourish the
intelligence of his child his letters to her attest. He was never too
busy to spare a half-hour in answering her letters. In a country
court-room, in the Senate-chamber, he wrote her brief and sprightly
notes, correcting her spelling, complimenting her style, reproving her
indolence, praising her industry, commenting on her authors. Rigorous
taskmaster as he was, he had a strong sense of the