ts of life corrupt while they polish
the intercourse of the sexes. The gross appetite of love becomes
most dangerous when it is elevated, or rather, indeed, disguised by
sentimental passion. The elegance of dress, of motion, and of
manners, gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the
imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious
spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female
frailty. From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were
secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life.
The German huts, open, on every side, to the eye of indiscretion or
jealousy, were a better safeguard of conjugal fidelity, than the walls,
the bolts, and the eunuchs of a Persian haram. To this reason another
may be added, of a more honorable nature. The Germans treated their
women with esteem and confidence, consulted them on every occasion
of importance, and fondly believed, that in their breasts resided a
sanctity and wisdom more than human. Some of the interpreters of fate,
such as Velleda, in the Batavian war, governed, in the name of the
deity, the fiercest nations of Germany. The rest of the sex, without
being adored as goddesses, were respected as the free and equal
companions of soldiers; associated even by the marriage ceremony to a
life of toil, of danger, and of glory. In their great invasions, the
camps of the barbarians were filled with a multitude of women, who
remained firm and undaunted amidst the sound of arms, the various forms
of destruction, and the honorable wounds of their sons and husbands.
Fainting armies of Germans have, more than once, been driven back upon
the enemy, by the generous despair of the women, who dreaded death much
less than servitude. If the day was irrecoverably lost, they well knew
how to deliver themselves and their children, with their own hands, from
an insulting victor. Heroines of such a cast may claim our admiration;
but they were most assuredly neither lovely, nor very susceptible of
love. Whilst they affected to emulate the stern virtues of man, they
must have resigned that attractive softness, in which principally
consist the charm and weakness of woman. Conscious pride taught
the German females to suppress every tender emotion that stood in
competition with honor, and the first honor of the sex has ever been
that of chastity. The sentiments and conduct of these high-spirited
matrons may, at once,