"Would you have your husband constantly at your feet? keep him at
some distance from your person. You will long maintain the
authority of love, if you know but how to render your favours rare
and valuable. It is thus you may employ even the arts of coquetry
in the service of virtue, and those of love in that of reason."
I shall close my extracts with a just description of a comfortable
couple. "And yet you must not imagine, that even such management
will always suffice. Whatever precaution be taken, enjoyment will,
by degrees, take off the edge of passion. But when love hath
lasted as long as possible, a pleasing habitude supplies its place,
and the attachment of a mutual confidence succeeds to the
transports of passion. Children often form a more agreeable and
permanent connexion between married people than even love itself.
When you cease to be the mistress of Emilius, you will continue to
be his wife and friend; you will be the mother of his children."
(Rousseau's Emilius.)
Children, he truly observes, form a much more permanent connexion
between married people than love. Beauty he declares will not be
valued, or even seen, after a couple have lived six months
together; artificial graces and coquetry will likewise pall on the
senses: why then does he say, that a girl should be educated for
her husband with the same care as for an eastern haram?
I now appeal from the reveries of fancy and refined licentiousness
to the good sense of mankind, whether, if the object of education
be to prepare women to become chaste wives and sensible mothers,
the method so plausibly recommended in the foregoing sketch, be the
one best calculated to produce those ends? Will it be allowed that
the surest way to make a wife chaste, is to teach her to practise
the wanton arts of a mistress, termed virtuous coquetry by the
sensualist who can no longer relish the artless charms of
sincerity, or taste the pleasure arising from a tender intimacy,
when confidence is unchecked by suspicion, and rendered interesting
by sense?
The man who can be contented to live with a pretty useful companion
without a mind, has lost in voluptuous gratifications a taste for
more refined enjoyments; he has never felt the calm satisfaction
that refreshes the parched heart, like the silent dew of heaven--of
being beloved by one who could understand him.
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