founded in nature, on honourable views, on virtue, on similarity of tastes, and sympathy of souls. 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 honour, 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 to satisfy all your demands, it is sufficient. I shall conclude with endeavouring to remove a difficulty which must naturally occur to any woman of reflection on the subject of marriage. What is to become of all those refinements of delicacy, that dignity of manners, 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 had 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 did in the eyes of your husbands. They have been sentiments which have floated in your imagination, but have never reached your hearts. But if these sentiments have been truly genuine, and if you have had the singular happy fate to attach those who understand them, you have no reason to be afraid. Marriage, indeed, will at once dispel the en chantment raised by external beauty; but the virtues and graces that first warmed the heart, that reserve and delicacy which always left the lover something further to wish, and often made him doubtful of your sensibility or attachment, may and ought ever to remain. The tumult of passion will necessarily subdue: but it will be succeeded by endearment, that affects the heart in a more equal, more sensible, and tender manner. But I must check myself and not indulge in descriptions, that may mislead you, and that too sensibly awake the remembrance of my happier days, which, perhaps, it were better for me to forget for ever. 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. I have endeavoured to avoid some peculiarities of opinion, which, from their contradiction to the general practice of the world, I might reasonably have suspected were not so well founded. 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 embarrassments 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. PREFACE TO THE READER. CORNELIA, daughter of Scipio Africanus, and mother of the Gracchi, was not more distinguished by the nobility of her rank, than by the lustre of those virtues which adorned her character-a most pleasing and amiable trait of which shines in that little incident recorded to her immortal honour. A lady of Ionia coming one day to visit her, impatiently expected to be shewn the splendour and magnificence of her toilette, which she supposed, from her rank and fortune, to be very superb. The illustrious Roman prolonged the conversation till her children were at hand, and then introducing them to her visitor" These, says she, are my jewels." The writer of these letters has so great a veneration for the domestic character of this lady, that she thinks she cannot do better than give them to the public, under the signature of Cornelia. And whatever their other defects may be, they have this at least to recommend them, that the same sentiments of maternal tenderness which influenced the Roman Matron, gave rise to these epistles, and prompted a fond Mother to become an Author. P LETTER I. A DESIRE of happiness is the first propensity of the heart. It is born with us, and to attempt its suppression were equally fruitless and wrong: for the Author of Nature has done nothing in vain, and the happiness he has imprinted on the mind so clear an idea of, has somewhere an existence. Hitherto you have obeyed the impulse of nature in the artless pursuits of childhood: but the time is at hand, when this sweet tranquillity will be interrupted by the bustle of the world, which will not longer permit you to repose in the simple amusements of dressing dolls, pursuing butterflies, or plucking daisies. Sweet dear delights of innocence: on which, as you climb the rugged heights of life, you will look back with fond regret. But we are not born for ourselves alone; and therefore have duties to perform, obligations to discharge, and difficulties to encounter; in the course of which, many a severe check is given to this happiness which we all so ardently seek; yet the desire of it will even acquire strength by the repulse, and there was never yet a wretch who had found it diminished by misfortune. I wish the success of this passion could be shewn as demonstrable as its existence. But the truth is, all mankind are running after the same object, though in such opposite directions, that if it were not for their concurrent testimony, it would be scarce credible that they had each the same view. Yet it is the fate of most of them to sit down, at last, in the very same disposition which Solomon was in when he complained, rather peevishly it must be owned, that all was vanity and vexation of spirit. Man walks indeed in a vain shadow, and 'tis pitiable to reflect that a being of so transient a duration should yet waste the trifling portion of time allotted him in vain and fruitless pursuits, and after all the schemes of the sanguine, and the labours of the active, to find the desired attainment as far off as ever. But this has been the case of millions, and I am afraid will still continue to be so, at least till we are unanimous in deciding on that grand point wherein this good, of which we have all so high an idea, consists: an agreement from which, alas, we are at the farthest distance imaginable. And here, my dearest girls, lies the whole of the mistake. The Creator has not been wanting to provide a happiness exalted as the mind itself can conceive; but man himself errs in the pursuit of it; some placing it in riches, some in power, scarcely one in an age supposing it to be where it really is in the practice of virtue. But while the human heart is set on acquirements, in which it can find no satisfaction if attained, the span of life must necessarily be passed in restless anxieties and melancholy disappointment. It was the aim of philosophy, to draw just estimates of things, and to prevent its pupils from being dazzled with the splendor of wealth and power; it taught that the sovereign good was to be found in rectitude of will. It would be |