and dance and play upon an instrument. Yet she does not discourage
ornamental talent; she admits it is a good thing, but not the best thing
that a woman has. She would not cut up time into an endless
multiplicity of employments, She urges mothers to impress on their
daughters' minds a discriminating estimate of personal beauty, so that
they may not have their heads turned by the adulation that men are so
prone to lavish on those who are beautiful. While she deprecates
harshness, she insists on a rigorous discipline. She would stimulate
industry and the cultivation of moderate abilities, as more likely to
win in the long race of life,--even as a barren soil and ungenial
climate have generally produced the most thrifty people. She would
banish frivolous books which give only superficial knowledge, and even
those abridgments and compendiums which form too considerable a part of
ordinary libraries, and recommends instead those works which exercise
the reasoning faculties and stir up the powers of the mind. She
expresses great contempt for English sentimentality, French philosophy,
Italian poetry, and German mysticism, and is scarcely less severe on the
novels of her day, which stimulate the imagination without adding to
knowledge. She recommends history as the most improving of all studies,
both as a revelation of the ways of Providence and as tending to the
enlargement of the mind. She insists on accuracy in language and on
avoiding exaggerations. She inculcates co-operation with man, and not
rivalry or struggle for power. What she says about women's
rights--which, it seems, was a question that agitated even her age--is
worth quoting, since it is a woman, and not a man, who speaks:--

"Is it not more wise to move contentedly in the plain path which
Providence has obviously marked out for the sex, and in which custom has
for the most part rationally confirmed them, rather than to stray
awkwardly, unbecomingly, unsuccessfully, in a forbidden road; to be the
lawful possessors of a lesser domestic territory, rather than the
turbulent usurpers of a wider foreign empire; to be good originals,
rather than bad imitators; to be the best thing of one's kind, rather
than an inferior thing even if it were of a higher kind; to be excellent
women, rather than indifferent men? Let not woman view with envy the
keen satirist hunting vice through all the doublings and windings of the
heart; the sagacious politician leading senates and direc