and delicacy.
Hence we may infer, that these qualities have not been only essential to
virtuous women in civilized countries, but were also constantly praised
and esteemed by men of sensibility; and that delicacy is an innate
principle in the female mind.

There are so many evils attending the loss of virtue in women, and so
greatly are the minds of that sex depraved when they have deviated from
the path of rectitude, that a general contamination of their morals may
be considered as one of the greatest misfortunes that can befal a state,
as in time it destroys almost every public virtue of the men. Hence all
wise legislators have strictly enforced upon the sex a particular purity
of manners; and not satisfied that they should abstain from vice only,
have required them even to shun every appearance of it.

Such, in some periods, were the laws of the Romans; and such were the
effects of these laws, that if ever female delicacy shone forth in a
conspicuous manner, it was perhaps among those people, after they had
worn off much of the barbarity of their first ages, and before they
became contaminated, by the wealth and manners of the nations which they
plundered and subjected. Then it was that we find many of their women
surpassing in modesty almost every thing related by fable; and then it
was that their ideas of delicacy were so highly refined, that they could
not even bear the secret consciousness of an involuntary crime, and far
less of having tacitly consented to it.

INFLUENCE OF FEMALE SOCIETY.

The company of ladies has a very powerful influence on the sentiments
and conduct of men. Women, the fruitful source of half our joys, and
perhaps of _more_ than half our sorrows, give an elegance to our manner,
and a relish to our pleasures. They soothe our afflictions, and soften
our cares. Too much of their company will render us effeminate, and
infallibly stamp upon us many signatures of the female nature. A rough
and unpolished behavior, as well as slovenliness of person, will
certainly be the consequence of an almost constant exclusion from it. By
spending a reasonable portion of our time in the company of women, and
another in the company of our own sex, we shall imbibe a proper share of
the softness of the female, and at the same time retain the firmness and
constancy of the male.

As little social intercourse subsisted between the two sexes, in the
more early ages of antiquity, we find the men less courteous,