males the characteristics of females: but let young girls have the privilege, which I dó consider it, of practising active domestic duties; let the air, the fields and the woods be free to them; nay, let them be inured to the vicissitudes of heat and cold: you know not where or how their lot may be cast in after life. Rear a plant up too tenderly, and the first wind of heaven that it is exposed to may crush it to the ground, and leave you to lament the fragility to which you gave birth.

CHAP. III.

COMPLAINTS, and severe ones, have been made of female schools. One great evil in them appears to be, that too much attention is paid to the acquiring of frivolous accomplishments, and too little to the improvement of the mind; but while parents choose one school, because it has such an elegant dancing-master; another, because music is taught there in so fashionable a style; and a third, because the head of it is a French woman, it is no great marvel, though schools should continue to be as too many of them are, like the warehouses of milliners, where young ladies may be fur nished with every outward decoration, but

which are utterly destitute of materials to enrich the mind. A sensible lady, the head of a school (would there were many such, and the objections to female schools might speedily be removed), when applications are made to her to admit pupils, says, "Understand, that we have no fine ladies, and that we wish to receive none: our aim in taking on us the charge of education, is to qualify those committed to our care to be useful members of society, as wives, as mothers, or in any station that they may be called on to fill. Accomplishments are taught with us, but only in their proper place, as ornaments, not as though they were the sole business of life. We are aware that our undertaking is of too serious a nature to allow us to waste time in trifles."

Parents, in placing their daughters at school, should consider their own circumstances as connected with their future happiness, and that of their children: they

distress themselves to give them an expensive education, and what are the consequences? These children acquire habits of refinement at school, which make them esteem the house and the company of their parents unfit for them, which render domestic duties a burden they are unable to bear, which place them in a rank they were not destined to hold. On the other hand, parents have the mortification, after all the privations they have suffered, and the expense they have put themselves to, to discover that they are objects of contempt to their children, that their children are miserable in themselves; and these reflections are accompanied with the bitter conviction, acquired too late, that their own folly has produced such evils to both. Even where a child has better dispositions than to despise her parents, she is rendered unhappy, by being rendered unfit for the station in which Providence had destined her to move. I knew a most amiable young woman who was thus, I shall say, unkindly treated by

her father: he distressed the other members of a numerous family to give her a finished education. She was placed at an expensive school, one I admit, where people of rank and fortune might have been pleased to place their daughters, from the attention paid in it, to the formation both of mind and manners, and where the daughters of such people were placed raised into a rank above her own, a superior style of dress was required for this girl to set her on a level with her companions, and thus fresh expenses were incurred. Poor thing, she used, on coming home at the holidays, to relate that their father's carriages came for her school-fellows, and that she was the subject of their wonder, because the stage came for her. When she finally came home, a new scene awaited her: she had acquired an elegance and softness of manners that would have graced the most elevated rank; and from nature and education, she had acquired likewise the happiest, the most virtuous dispositions. A change was