on, and infallibly shuts the door of repentance against
an unfortunate sister, willing, perhaps, to abandon the vices into which
heedless inadvertency had plunged her, and from which none of you can
promise yourselves an absolute security.

We wish not, fair countrywomen, like the declaimer and satirist, to
paint you all vice and imperfection, nor, like the venal panegyrist, to
exhibit you all virtue. As impartial historians, we confess that you
have, in the present age, many virtues and good qualities, which were
either nearly or altogether unknown to your ancestors; but do you not
exceed them in some follies and vices also? Is not the levity,
dissipation, and extravagance of the women of this century arrived to a
pitch unknown and unheard of in former times? Is not the course which
you steer in life, almost entirely directed by vanity and fashion? And
are there not too many of you who, throwing aside reason and good
conduct, and despising the counsel of your friends and relations, seem
determined to follow the mode of the world, however it may be mixed with
vice? Do not the generality of you dress, and appear above your station,
and are not many of you ashamed to be seen performing the duties of it?
To sum up all, do not too, too many of you act as if you thought the
care of a family, and the other domestic virtues, beneath your
attention, and that the sole end for which you were sent into the world,
was to please and divert yourselves, at the expense of those poor
wretches the men, whom you consider as obliged to support you in every
kind of idleness and extravagance? While such is your conduct, and while
the contagion is every day increasing, you are not to be surprised if
the men, still fond of you as playthings in the hours of mirth and
revelry, ever shun serious connection with you; and while they wish to
be possessed of your charms, are so much afraid of your manners and
conduct, that they prefer the cheerless state of a bachelor, to the
numberless evils arising from being tied to a modern wife.

CUSTOM IN THE MOGUL EMPIRE.

In a variety of parts of the Mogul empire, when the women are carried
abroad, they are put into a kind of machine like a chariot, and placed
on the backs of camels, or in covered sedan chairs, and surrounded by a
guard of eunuchs and armed men, in such a manner, that a stranger would
rather suppose the cavalcade to be carrying some desperate villain to
execution, than employed to prevent