ounds,
as she is assured it can know no end.

YET this trusting confidence, this honest indiscretion, is, at this
early period of life as amiable as it is natural; and will, if wisely
cultivated, produce, at its proper season, fruits infinitely more
valuable than all the guarded circumspection of premature, and therefore
artificial, prudence. Men, I believe, are seldom struck with these
sudden prepossessions in favour of each other. They are not so
unsuspecting, nor so easily led away by the predominance of fancy. They
engage more warily, and pass through the several stages of acquaintance,
intimacy, and confidence, by slower gradations; but women, if they are
sometimes deceived in the choice of a friend, enjoy even then an higher
degree of satisfaction than if they never trusted. For to be always clad
in the burthensome armour of suspicion is more painful and inconvenient,
than to run the hazard of suffering now and then a transient injury.

BUT the above observations only extend to the young and the
inexperienced; for I am very certain, that women are capable of as
faithful and as durable friendship as any of the other sex. They can
enter not only into all the enthusiastic tenderness, but into all the
solid fidelity of attachment. And if we cannot oppose instances of equal
weight with those of Nysus and Euryalus, Theseus and Pirithous, Pylades
and Orestes, let it be remembered, that it is because the recorders of
those characters were men, and that the very existence of them is merely
poetical.

[6] See Voltaire's Prophecy concerning Rousseau.

ON
TRUE AND FALSE
MEEKNESS.

A LOW voice and soft address are the common indications of a well-bred
woman, and should seem to be the natural effects of a meek and quiet
spirit; but they are only the outward and visible signs of it: for they
are no more meekness itself, than a red coat is courage, or a black one
devotion.

YET nothing is more common than to mistake the sign for the thing
itself; nor is any practice more frequent than that of endeavouring to
acquire the exterior mark, without once thinking to labour after the
interior grace. Surely this is beginning at the wrong end, like
attacking the symptom and neglecting the disease. To regulate the
features, while the soul is in tumults, or to command the voice while
the passions are without restraint, is as idle as throwing odours into
a stream when the source is polluted.

THE _sapient king_, who knew