nt among the women, the passion of love.[395] Sappho, who always
leads on this occasion, began to show her reading, and told us, that Sir
John Suckling and Milton had, upon a parallel occasion, said the
tenderest things she had ever read. "The circumstance," said she, "is
such as gives us a notion of that protecting part which is the duty of
men in their honourable designs upon, or possession of, women. In
Suckling's tragedy of 'Brennoralt' he makes the lover steal into his
mistress's bedchamber, and draw the curtains; then, when his heart is
full of her charms, as she lies sleeping, instead of being carried away
by the violence of his desires into thoughts of a warmer nature, sleep,
which is the image of death, gives this generous lover reflections of a
different kind, which regard rather her safety than his own passion.
For, beholding her as she lies sleeping, he utters these words:

_"So misers look upon their gold,
Which, while they joy to see, they fear to lose:
The pleasure of the sight scarce equalling
The jealousy of being dispossessed by others.
Her face is like the Milky Way i' th' sky,
A meeting of gentle lights without name!

"Heavens I shall this fresh ornament of the world,
These precious love-lines, pass with other common things
Amongst the wastes of time? what pity 'twere!_[396]

"When Milton makes Adam leaning on his arm, beholding Eve, and lying in
the contemplation of her beauty, he describes the utmost tenderness and
guardian affection in one word:

"_Adam with looks of cordial love
Hung over her enamoured._[397]

"This is that sort of passion which truly deserves the name of 'love,'
and has something more generous than friendship itself; for it has a
constant care of the object beloved, abstracted from its own interests
in the possession of it." Sappho was proceeding on the subject, when my
sister produced a letter sent to her in the time of my absence, in
celebration of the marriage state, which is the condition wherein only
this sort of passion reigns in full authority. The epistle is as
follows:

"DEAR MADAM,

"Your brother being absent, I dare take the liberty of writing to you my
thoughts of that state, which our whole sex either is or desires to be
in: you'll easily guess I mean matrimony, which I hear so much decried,
that it was with no small labour I maintained my ground against two
opponents; but, as your brother observed of Socrates, I