ers believe, that no one can
be well educated without having served an apprenticeship of so many
lessons under some of these privileged masters. But it is in vain that
they intrench themselves, they are pursued by the intrusive vulgar. In
a wealthy, mercantile nation, there is nothing which can be bought for
money, which will long continue to be an envied distinction. The hope
of attaining to that degree of eminence in the fine arts which really
deserves celebrity, becomes every day more difficult to private
practitioners, because the number of competitors daily increases; and
it is the interest of masters to forward their pupils by every
possible means. Both genius and perseverance must now be united to
obtain the prize of distinction; and how seldom are they found, or
kept together, in the common course of education!

Considering all these circumstances, is not there some reason to
apprehend, that in a few years the taste for several fashionable
appendages of female education, may change, and that those will
consequently be treated with neglect, who have no other claim to
public regard, than their proficiency in what may, perhaps, then be
thought vulgar or obsolete accomplishments? Our great grandmothers
distinguished themselves by truly substantial tent-work chairs and
carpets, by needle-work pictures of Solomon and the queen of Sheba.
These were admirable in their day, but their day is over; and these
useful, ingenious, and laborious specimens of female talents, are
consigned to the garret, or they are produced but as curiosities, to
excite wonder at the strange patience and miserable destiny of former
generations: the taste for tapestry and embroidery is thus past; the
long labours of the loom have ceased. Cloth-work, crape-work,
chenille-work, ribbon-work, wafer-work, with a long train of
etceteras, have all passed away in our own memory; yet these conferred
much evanescent fame, and a proportional quantity of vain emulation. A
taste for drawing, or music, cannot be classed with any of these
trifling performances; but there are many faded drawings of the
present generations, which cannot stand in competition with the
glowing and faithful colours of the silk and worsted of former times;
and many of the hours spent at a _stammering_ harpsichord, might,
surely, with full as much domestic advantage, have been devoted to the
embellishment of chairs and carpets. We hope that no one will so
perversely misunderstand us,