It is this power of looking into the heart,
and responsively vibrating with each emotion, that enables the poet
to personify each passion, and the painter to sketch with a pencil
of fire.
True taste is ever the work of the understanding employed in
observing natural effects; and till women have more understanding,
it is vain to expect them to possess domestic taste. Their lively
senses will ever be at work to harden their hearts, and the
emotions struck out of them will continue to be vivid and
transitory, unless a proper education stores their minds with
knowledge.
It is the want of domestic taste, and not the acquirement of
knowledge, that takes women out of their families, and tears the
smiling babe from the breast that ought to afford it nourishment.
Women have been allowed to remain in ignorance, and slavish
dependence, many, very many years, and still we hear of nothing but
their fondness of pleasure and sway, their preference of rakes and
soldiers, their childish attachment to toys, and the vanity that
makes them value accomplishments more than virtues.
History brings forward a fearful catalogue of the crimes which
their cunning has produced, when the weak slaves have had
sufficient address to over-reach their masters. In France, and in
how many other countries have men been the luxurious despots, and
women the crafty ministers? Does this prove that ignorance and
dependence domesticate them? Is not their folly the by-word of the
libertines, who relax in their society; and do not men of sense
continually lament, that an immoderate fondness for dress and
dissipation carries the mother of a family for ever from home?
Their hearts have not been debauched by knowledge, nor their minds
led astray by scientific pursuits; yet, they do not fulfil the
peculiar duties, which as women they are called upon by nature to
fulfil.
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