CHAP. IV.

caprices, and slaves to his mean passions. Soon will their present empire of gallantry be over. It is a refinement of manners which sprang from Christianity; and when Christianity is forgotten, this artificial diadem will be taken from their heads, and unless they adopt the ferocious sentiments of their Gallic neighbours, and join in the general uproar, they will sink into the insignificance of the women in the turbulent republics of Greece, where they are never seen in the busy haunts of men, if we except four or five, who, during the course of as many centuries, emerged from the general obscurity, and appear in the historic page, by their uncommon talents, and by the sacrifice of what my fair countrywomen still hold to be the ornament of their sex. I would remind them, that they have it in their power to retain their present honourable station in society. They are our early instructors; and while mothers in the respectable stations of life continued to inculcate on the tender minds of their sons a veneration for the precepts of Religion, their pliant children, receiving their instructions along with the affectionate caresses of their mothers, got impressions which long retained their force, and which protected them from the impulses of youthful passions, till ripening years fitted their minds for listening to serious instruction from their public teachers. Sobriety and decency of manners were then no slur on the character of a youth, and he was thought capable of struggling for independence, or pre-eminence, fit either for supporting or defending the state, although he was neither a toper nor a rake. I believe that no man who has seen thirty or forty years of life will deny that the manners of youth are sadly changed in this respect. And, without presuming to say that this has proceeded from the neglect, and almost total cessation of the moral education of the nursery, I think myself well warranted, from my own observation, to say that this education and the sober manners of young men have quitted us together.