A young woman may fix her affections on a man, who may prove perfidious On a man, who may be engaged to another woman; as my brother had like to have been On a man who may be superior to her in degree or fortune; or who may be greatly inferior to her in both. If love be not a voluntary passion, why not upon an hostler, a groom, a coachman, a footman A grenadier, a trooper, a foot-soldier? She may be in Mrs. Eggleton’s case: her lover may be takL’u from her by death. In either, or any, of these cases, what is to be done? Must a woman sit down, cry herself blind, and become useless to the principal end of her being, as to this life, and to all family coimexions, when, jDrobably, she has not lived one third of her time? Silly creatures! to main-tain these nonsenses at their own expence, in favour of a pa?^sion tiiat is generally confined to the days of girlhood; and which they themselves would laugh at in a woman after sb.e was arrived at honest thirty, or at years of discretion Thus narrowing their own use and consequence. I, for my part, am, and ever Vtill be, a friend of my sex.

But, hark ye, girls Let me ask you Do you find many of these constrnit nymphs, when they have had their foolish way given them, and they have hu>ied the honest man of whom they were once so dotingly fond, refuse to marry again? Do they wish, like the wives of some pugan wretches, to be thrown into the funeral pile, with the dead bodies of their lords? No! T’ley have had thcir iK-himsc!j out. Their Jit

‘* Vol. XIV, t>. 171, 172. of constancy is over; and, quiet good souls as they are by that time become, they go on without rnnti-poling, in the ordinary course of reasonable crea — tures.

Not but Harriet was in earnest: I am sure she was. She believed, she certainlj/heVieved, herself. And were it given to us women uhvaijs to be in one mind, she would have made all her friends, the good Mrs. Shirley at the head of us, despair of succeeding with her in our endeavours to induce her to change it. But Harriet, with all her wisdom, could not know what time would have done for her. Time is the pacifier of every woe, the qualifier of every disappointment Pity for the man [The Earl of D. suppose He would have thought it worth his while to feign dying for her]; the entreaty of her friends: you see what arguments her excellent grand-mamma could have produced Pho, pho, never fear but Harriet would have married before my brother and Clementina had seen the face of their second boy l!io girls shall he have, for fear they should be romancers.