age, nor any
action to which they are prompted by nature, seem more indelicate or
reprehensible than another. Such are the effects of a total want of
culture.

Effects not very dissimilar, are, in France and Italy, produced from a
redundance of it. Though those are the polite countries in Europe, women
there set themselves above shame, and despise delicacy. It is laughed
out of existence, as a silly and unfashionable weakness.

But in China, one of the politest countries in Asia, and perhaps not
even, in this respect, behind France, or Italy, the case is quite
otherwise. No human being can be more delicate than a Chinese woman in
her dress, in her behavior, and in her conversation; and should she ever
happen to be exposed in any unbecoming manner, she feels with the
greatest poignancy the awkwardness of her situation, and if possible,
covers her face, that she may not be known.

In the midst of so many discordant appearances, the mind is perplexed,
and can hardly fix upon any cause to which female delicacy is to be
ascribed. If we attend, however, to the whole animal creation, if we
consider it attentively wherever it falls under our observation, it will
discover to us, that in the female there is a greater degree of delicacy
or coy reserve than in the male. Is not this a proof, that, through the
wide extent of creation, the seeds of delicacy are more liberally
bestowed upon females than upon males?

In the remotest periods of which we have any historical account, we find
that the women had a delicacy to which the other sex were strangers.
Rebecca veiled herself when she first approached Isaac, her future
husband. Many of the fables of antiquity mark, with the most
distinguishing characters, the force of female delicacy. Of this kind is
the fable of Actaeon and Diana. Actaeon, a famous hunter, being in the
woods with his hounds, beating for game, accidentally spied Diana and
her nymphs bathing in a river. Prompted by curiosity, he stole silently
into a neighboring thicket, that he might have a nearer view of them.
The goddess discovering him, was so affronted at his audacity, and so
much ashamed to have been seen naked, that in revenge she immediately
transformed him into a stag, set his own hounds upon him, and encouraged
them to overtake and devour him. Besides this, and other fables, and
historical anecdotes of antiquity, their poets seldom exhibit a female
character without adorning it with the graces of modesty