pen and lighter heart of the other.

And yet that other, although in unbosoming himself to a select friend,
he discover wickedness enough to entitle him to general detestation,
preserves a decency, as well in his images as in his language, which
is not always to be found in the works of some of the most celebrated
modern writers, whose subjects and characters have less warranted the
liberties they have taken.

In the letters of the two young ladies, it is presumed, will be
found not only the highest exercise of a reasonable and practicable
friendship, between minds endowed with the noblest principles of
virtue and religion, but occasionally interspersed, such delicacy of
sentiments, particularly with regard to the other sex; such instances
of impartiality, each freely, as a fundamental principle of their
friendship, blaming, praising, and setting right the other, as are
strongly to be recommended to the observation of the younger part (more
specially) of female readers.

The principle of these two young ladies is proposed as an exemplar to
her sex. Nor is it any objection to her being so, that she is not in
all respects a perfect character. It was not only natural, but it was
necessary, that she should have some faults, were it only to show the
reader how laudably she could mistrust and blame herself, and carry to
her own heart, divested of self-partiality, the censure which arose from
her own convictions, and that even to the acquittal of those, because
revered characters, whom no one else would acquit, and to whose much
greater faults her errors were owing, and not to a weak or reproachable
heart. As far as it is consistent with human frailty, and as far as she
could be perfect, considering the people she had to deal with, and those
with whom she was inseparably connected, she is perfect. To have been
impeccable, must have left nothing for the Divine Grace and a purified
state to do, and carried our idea of her from woman to angel. As such is
she often esteemed by the man whose heart was so corrupt that he could
hardly believe human nature capable of the purity, which, on every trial
or temptation, shone out in her's [sic].

Besides the four principal person, several others are introduced, whose
letters are characteristic: and it is presumed that there will be found
in some of them, but more especially in those of the chief character
among the men, and the second character among the women, such strokes of
gayety,