Unable to educate
her sons, or impress them with respect; for it is not a play on
words to assert, that people are never respected, though filling an
important station, who are not respectable; she pines under the
anguish of unavailing impotent regret. The serpent's tooth enters
into her very soul, and the vices of licentious youth bring her
with sorrow, if not with poverty also, to the grave.
This is not an overcharged picture; on the contrary, it is a very
possible case, and something similar must have fallen under every
attentive eye.
I have, however, taken it for granted, that she was well disposed,
though experience shows, that the blind may as easily be led into a
ditch as along the beaten road. But supposing, no very improbable
conjecture, that a being only taught to please must still find her
happiness in pleasing; what an example of folly, not to say vice,
will she be to her innocent daughters! The mother will be lost in
the coquette, and, instead of making friends of her daughters, view
them with eyes askance, for they are rivals--rivals more cruel than
any other, because they invite a comparison, and drive her from the
throne of beauty, who has never thought of a seat on the bench of
reason.
It does not require a lively pencil, or the discriminating outline
of a caricature, to sketch the domestic miseries and petty vices
which such a mistress of a family diffuses.
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