His ridiculous stories, which tend to prove that girls are
NATURALLY attentive to their persons, without laying any stress on
daily example, are below contempt. And that a little miss should
have such a correct taste as to neglect the pleasing amusement of
making O's, merely because she perceived that it was an ungraceful
attitude, should be selected with the anecdotes of the learned
pig.*
(*Footnote. "I once knew a young person who learned to write
before she learned to read, and began to write with her needle
before she could use a pen. At first indeed, she took it into her
head to make no other letter than the O: this letter she was
constantly making of all sizes, and always the wrong way.
Unluckily one day, as she was intent on this employment, she
happened to see herself in the looking glass; when, taking a
dislike to the constrained attitude in which she sat while writing,
she threw away her pen, like another Pallas, and determined against
making the O any more. Her brother was also equally averse to
writing: it was the confinement, however, and not the constrained
attitude, that most disgusted him."
Rousseau's "Emilius.")
I have, probably, had an opportunity of observing more girls in
their infancy than J. J. Rousseau. I can recollect my own
feelings, and I have looked steadily around me; yet, so far from
coinciding with him in opinion respecting the first dawn of the
female character, I will venture to affirm, that a girl, whose
spirits have not been damped by inactivity, or innocence tainted by
false shame, will always be a romp, and the doll will never excite
attention unless confinement allows her no alternative.
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