principles and good manners. Yet,
because I design to buy the _Tatlers_ for my daughters to read, I take
the freedom to desire you, for the future, to say nothing about any
combat between Alexander and Thalestris."[335]

This offence gives me occasion to express myself with the resentment I
ought, on people who take liberties of speech before that sex of whom
the honoured names of mother, daughter, and sister, are a part: I had
liked to have named wife in the number; but the senseless world are so
mistaken in their sentiments of pleasure, that the most amiable term in
human life is become the derision of fools and scorners. My brother and
I have at least fifty times quarrelled upon this topic. I ever argue,
that the frailties of women are to be imputed to the false ornaments
which men of wit put upon our folly and coquetry. He lays all the vices
of men upon women's secret approbation of libertine characters in them.
I did not care to give up a point; but now he is out of the way, I
cannot but own I believe there is very much in what he asserted: for if
you will believe your eyes, and own, that the wickedest and the wittiest
of them all marry one day or other, is it possible to believe, that if a
man thought he should be for ever incapable of being received by a woman
of merit and honour, he would persist in an abandoned way, and deny
himself the possibility of enjoying the happiness of well-governed
desires, orderly satisfactions, and honourable methods of life? If our
sex were wise, a lover should have a certificate from the last woman he
served, how he was turned away, before he was received into the service
of another: but at present any vagabond is welcome, provided he promises
to enter into our livery. It is wonderful, that we will not take a
footman without credentials from his last master; and in the greatest
concern of life, we make no scruple of falling into a treaty with the
most notorious offender in his behaviour against others. But this breach
of commerce between the sexes, proceeds from an unaccountable prevalence
of custom, by which a woman is to the last degree reproachable for being
deceived, and a man suffers no loss of credit for being a deceiver.
Since this tyrant humour has gained place, why are we represented in the
writings of men in ill figures for artifice in our carriage, when we
have to do with a professed impostor? When oaths, imprecations, vows,
and adorations, are made use of as words of co