y excellent women who have passed through the ordeal of
dissipation untainted, and, still themselves possessing loving hearts
and simple minds, are fearlessly preparing their daughters for the same
dangerous course. Remember that those from whom you would shrink from a
supposed equality on other points cannot be safely taken as examples for
your own course of life. Your own concern is to ascertain the effect
produced upon your own mind by different kinds of society, and to
examine whether you yourself have the same healthy taste for simple
pleasures and unexciting pursuits as before you engaged, even as
slightly as you have already done, in the dissipation of a London
season.

I once heard a young lady exclaim, when asked to accompany her family on
a boating excursion, "Can any thing be more tiresome than a family
party?" Young as she was, she had already lost all taste for the simple
pleasures of domestic life. As she was intellectual and accomplished,
she could still enjoy solitude; but her only ideas of pleasure as
connected with a party were those of admiration and excitement. We may
trace the same feelings in the complaints perpetually heard of the
stupidity of parties,--complaints generally proceeding from those who
are too much accustomed to attention and admiration to be contented with
the unexciting pleasures of rational conversation, the exercise of
kindly feelings, and the indulgence of social habits--all in their way
productive of contentment to those who have preserved their mind in a
state of freshness and simplicity. Any greater excitement than that
produced by the above means cannot surely be profitable to those who
only seek in society for so much pleasure as will afford them
_relaxation_; those who engage in an arduous conflict with ever-watchful
enemies both within and without ought carefully to avoid having their
weapons of defence _unstrung_. I know that at present you would shrink
from the idea of making pleasure your professed pursuit, from the idea
of engaging in it for any other purpose but the one above stated--that
of necessary relaxation; I should not otherwise have addressed you as I
do now. Your only danger at present is, that you may, I should hope
indeed unconsciously, _acquire_ the habit of requiring excitement during
your hours of relaxation.

In opposition to all that I have said, you will probably be often told
that excitement, instead of being prejudicial, is favourable to the
heal