ignorance. A misplaced
shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant.
To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of
administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would
always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of
knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already
set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment
of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the
larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a
great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them
too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything
more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own
advantages--did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate
heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young
man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward. In the present
instance, she confessed and lamented her want of knowledge, declared
that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and
a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his
instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in
everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest that he
became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste.
He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances--side-screens
and perspectives--lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a
scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily
rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.
Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much
wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy
transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which
he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the
enclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly
found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an
easy step to silence. The general pause which succeeded his short
disquisition on the state of the nation was put an end to by Catherine,
who, in rather a solemn tone of voice, uttered these words, "I have
heard that something very shocking indeed will soon come out in London."

Miss Tilney, to whom this was ch