whom you give your heart, but who, if he has the least delicacy, will despise them if he knows that they have been prostituted to fifty men before him. The sentiment, that a woman may allow all innocent freedoms, provided her virtue is secure, is both grossly indelicate and dangerous, and has proved fatal to many of your sex.
Let me now recommend to year attention that elegance, which is not so much a quality itself, as the high polish of every other. It is what diffuses an ineffable grace over every look, every motion, every sentence you utter; it gives that charm to beauty, without which it generally fails to please. It is partly a personal quality, in which respect it is the gift of nature; but I speak of it principally as a quality of the mind. In a word, it is the perfection of taste in life and manners;—every virtue and every excellency in their most graceful and amiable forms.
You may perhaps think that I want to throw every spark of nature out of your composition, and to make you entirely artificial. Far from it. I wish you to possess the most perfect simplicity of heart and manners. I think you may possess dignity without pride, affability without meanness, and simple elegance without affectation. Milton had my idea, when he says of Eve,
Grace was in all her steps, Heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love.
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AMUSEMENTS.
EVERY period of life has amusements which are natural and proper to it. You may indulge the variety of your tastes in these, whileyou
