subsisting as that of want of ease, and
freedom, in the gesture and gait. On the contrary, it is as
great an enemy to stiffness, as it is to looseness of carriage,
and air. It equally reprobates an ungainly rusticity, and a
mincing, tripping, over-soft manner. Its chief aim is to bring
forth the natural graces, and not to smother them with
appearances of study and art.

But of all the people in the world, the British would certainly
be the most in the wrong for not laying a great enough stress on
this part of education; since none have more conspicuously the
merit of figure and person; and it would in them be a sort of
ingratitude to Nature, who has done so much for them, not to do
a little more for themselves, in acquiring an accomplishment,
the utility of which has been acknowledged in all ages, and in
all countries, and especially by the greatest and most sensible
men in their own.

As to the ladies, there is one light in which perhaps they would
not do amiss to view the practice of this art, besides that of
mere diversion or improvement of their deportment: it is that of
its being highly serviceable to their health, and to what it can
never be expected they should be indifferent about, their
beauty, it being the best and surest way of preserving, or even
giving it to their whole person.

It is in history a settled point, that beauty was no where more
florishing, nor less rare, than among such people as encouraged
and cultivated exercise, especially in the fair sex. The various
provinces and governments in Greece, all agreed, some in a less,
some in a greater degree, in making exercise a point of female
education. The Spartans carried this to perhaps an excess, since
the training of the children of that sex, hardly yielded to that
of the male in laboriousness and fatigue. Be this confessed to
be an extreme: but then it was in some measure compensated by
its being universally allowed, that the Spartan women owed to it
that beauty in which they excelled the rest of the Grecian
women, who were themselves held, in that point, preferable to
the rest of the world. Hellen was a Spartan. Yet the legislator
of that people, did not so much as consider this advantage among
the ends proposed in prescribing so hardy an education to the
weaker sex. His views were for giving them that health and vigor
of body, which might enable them to produce a race of men the
fittest to serve their country in war.

But as the best habit