st give them that degree of life and spirit which serves to
warm their hearts, and keep their minds in motion."

CHAPTER XXXV.

Miss Sparkes came to spend the next day according to her appointment.
Mr. Flam, who called accidentally, staid to dinner. Mr. and Mrs. Carlton
had been previously invited. After dinner the conversation chanced to
turn upon domestic economy, a quality which Miss Sparkes professed to
hold in the most sovereign contempt.

After some remark of Mrs. Stanley, in favor of the household virtues,
Mr. Carlton said, "Mr. Addison in the Spectator, and Dr. Johnson in the
Rambler, have each given us a lively picture of a vulgar,
ungentlewoman-like, illiterate housewife. The notable woman of the one
suffocated her guests at night with drying herbs in their chamber, and
tormented them all day with plans of economy, and lectures on
management. The economist of the other ruined her husband by her
parsimonious extravagance, if I may be allowed to couple contradictions;
by her tent-stich hangings for which she had no walls, and her
embroidery for which she had no use. The poor man pathetically laments
her detestable catalogues of made wines, which hurt his fortune by their
profusion, and his health by not being allowed to drink them till they
were sour. Both ladies are painted as domestic tyrants, whose husbands
had no peace, and whose children had no education."

"Those coarse housewives," said Sir John, "were exhibited as _warnings_.
It was reserved for the pen of Richardson to exhibit _examples_. This
author, with deeper and juster views of human nature, a truer taste for
the proprieties of female character, and a more exact intuition into
real life than any other writer of fabulous narrative, has given in his
heroines exemplifications of elegantly cultivated minds, combined with
the sober virtues of domestic economy. In no other writer of fictitious
adventures has the triumph of religion and reason over the passions, and
the now almost exploded doctrines of filial obedience, and the household
virtues, their natural concomitants, been so successfully blended.
Whether the works of this most original, but by no means faultless
writer, were cause or effect, I know not; whether these well-imagined
examples induced the ladies of that day 'to study household good;' or
whether the then existing ladies, by their acknowledged attention to
feminine concerns, furnished Richardson with living models, I can not