fatal poison, all that species of reading and conversation which warms the imagination, which engages and softens the heart, and raises the taste above the level of common life. If you do otherwise, consider the terrible conflict of passions which this may afterwards raise in your breasts.

If this refinement once takes deep root in your minds, and you do not obey its dictates, but marry from vulgar and mercenary views, you may never be able to eradicate it entirely; and then it will embitter all your married days. Instead of meeting with sense, delicacy, tenderness, a lover, a friend, an equal companion, in a husband, you may be tired with insipidity and dulness; shocked with indelicacy, or mortified with indifference. You will find none to compassionate or even understand your sufferance; for your husbands may not use you cruelly, and may give you as much money for your clothes, personal expense, and domestic necessaries, as is suitable to their fortunes; the world would therefore look upon you as unreasonable women, who did not deserve to be happy, if you were not so.—' -To avoid these complicated evils, if you are determined at all events to marry, I would advise you to make all your reading and amusements of such a kind as do not affect the heart, nor the imagination.

I have no view by these advices to lead your taste; I only want to persuade you of the necessity of knowing your own minds, which, though seemingly very easy, is what your sex seldom attain on many important occasions in life, but particularly on this of which I am speaking. There is not a quality I more anxiously wish you to possess, than a collected decisive spirit which rests on itself, which enables you to see where your true happiness lies,

and to pursue it with the most determined resolution. In matters of business, follow the advice of those who know them better than yourselves, and in whose integrity you can confide; but, in matters of taste, that depend upon your own feelings, consult no one friend whatever, but consult your own hearts.

If a gentleman makes his addresses to you, or gives you reason to believe he will do so, before you allow your affections to be engaged, endeavor, in the most prudent and secret manner, to procure from your friends every necessary information concerning him; such as his character for sense, his morals, his temper, fortune and family; whether it is distinguished for parts and worth, or for folly, knavery, and loathsome hereditary diseases. When your friends inform you of these, they have fulfilled their duty. If they go further, they have not that deference for you which a becoming dignity on your part would effectually command. Whatever your views are in marrying, take every possible precaution to prevent their being disappointed. If fortune and the pleasures it brings are your aim, it is not sufficient that the settlement of a jointure and children's provisions be amply and properly secured; it is necessary that you should enjoy the fortune during your own life. The principal security you can have for this will depend on your marrying a good natured, generous man, who despises money, and who will let you live where you can best enjoy that pleasure, that pomp, and parade of life, for which you married him.

I am, &c.

LETTER 147.

From the same to the same, on the foregoing subject.

DEAR DAUGHTERS,

From what I wrote in my last, you will easily see that I could never pretend to advise whom you should marry; but I can with confidence advise whom you should not marry.

Avoid a companion that may entail any hereditary disease on your posterity; particularly, that most dreadful of all human calamities, madness. It is the height of imprudence to run into such danger, and, in my opinion, highly criminal.

Do not marry a fool; he is the most untractable of all animals; he is led by his passions and caprices, and is incapable of hearing the voice of reason. It may probably too hurt your vanity to have husbands for whom you have reason to blush and tremble, every time they open their lips in company. But the worst circumstance that attends a fool is, his constant jealousy of his wife's being thought to govern him. This renders it impossible to lead him, and he is continually doing absurd and disa greeable things, for no other reason but to show he dares to do them.

A rake is always a suspicious husband, because he has only known the most worthless of your sex. He likewise entails the worst of diseases on his wife and children, if he has the misfortune to have any.

If you have a sense of religion yourselves, do not think of husbands who have none. If they have tolerable understandings, they will be glad that you have religion, for their own sake, and for the sake of their families. If

they are weak men, they will be continually teazing and shocking you about your principles. If you have children, you will suffer the most bitter distress, in seeing all your endeavors to form their minds to virtue and piety, all your endeavors to secure their present and eternal happiness, frustrated and turned into ridicule.

As I look on your choice of a husband to be of the greatest consequence to your happiness, I hope you will make it with the utmost circumspection. Do not give way to a sudden sally of passion, and dignify it with the name of love.-Genuine love is not founded in caprice; it is founded in nature-on honorable views and virtues, on similarity of taste and sympathy of soul. If you have these sentiments, you will never marry any one, when you are not in that situation, in point of fortune, which is necessary to the happiness of either of you. What that competency may be, can only be determined by your own tastes. It would be ungenerous in you to take advantage of a lover's attachment to plunge him into distress; and if he has any honor, no personal gratification will ever tempt him to enter into any connexion, which will render you unhappy. If you have as much between you as will satisfy all your demands, it is sufficient. I shall conclude with endeavoring to remove a difficulty, which must occur to any woman of reflection, on the subject of marriage.

What is to become of all those refinements of delicacy-that dignity of manner which checked all familiarities, and suspended desire in respectful and awful admiration? In answer to this, I shall only observe, that if motives of interest or vanity have any share in your resolutions to marry, none of these chimerical notions will give you any pain; nay, they will very quickly appear

as ridiculous in your own eyes, as they probably always do in the eyes of your husband. They have been senti. ments which floated in your imaginations, but have never reached your hearts. But if these sentiments have been truly genuine, and if you have had the singularly happy fate to attach those who understand them, you have no reason to be afraid.

I have thus given you my opinion on some of the most important articles of your future life, chiefly calculated for that period, when you are just entering the world. But in writing to you, I am afraid my heart has been too full, and too warmly interested, to allow me to keep this resolution. This may have produced some embarrassment, and some seeming contradictions. What I have written has been the amusement of some solitary hours, and has served to divert some melancholy reflections.-I am conscious I undertook a task to which I was very unequal; but I have discharged a part of my duty.-You will at least be pleased with it, as the last mark of your father's love and attention.

I am, your affectionate father.