e who
wrote the treatise entitled "The Whole Duty of Man;" and his reasoning
is so much to the point, though quaint, that we simply append what he
says of her, with his apt quotations from her writings, as a
sufficiently clear delineation of the character and talents of this
worthy woman. He writes:

"Yet hardly my pen will be thought capable of adding to the reputation
her own has procured to her, if it shall appear that she was the author
of a work which is not more an honor to the writer than a universal
benefit to mankind. The work I mean is 'The Whole Duty of Man;' her
title to which has been so well ascertained, that the general
concealment it has lain under will only reflect a luster upon all her
other excellencies by showing that she had no honor in view but that of
her Creator, which, I suppose, she might think best promoted by this
concealment. (The claims of other authors are not difficult to be
disposed of.) If I were a Roman Catholic, I would summon tradition as an
evidence for me on this occasion, which has constantly attributed this
performance to a lady. And a late celebrated writer observes, that
'there are many probable arguments in "The Whole Duty of Man," to back a
current report that it was written by a lady,' And any one who reads
'The Lady's Calling,' may observe a great number of passages which
clearly indicate a female hand.

"That vulgar prejudice of the supposed incapacity of the female sex is
what these memoirs in general may possibly remove; and as I have had
frequent occasion to take notice of it, I should not now enter again
upon that subject, had not this been made use of as an argument to
invalidate Lady Pakington's title to those performances. It may not be
amiss, therefore, to transcribe two or three passages from the treatise
I have just now mentioned. 'But, waiving these reflections, I shall fix
only on the personal accomplishments of the sex, and peculiarly that
which is the most principal endowment of the rational nature--I mean the
understanding--where it will be a little hard to pronounce that they are
naturally inferior to men, when it is considered how much of intrinsic
weight is put in the balance to turn it to the men's side. Men have
their parts cultivated and improved by education; refined and subtilized
by learning and arts; are like a piece of common which, by industry and
husbandry, becomes a different thing from the rest, though the natural
turf owned no such inequali