eligious. I have not so much
animadverted on the unavoidable faults and frailties inseparable from
humanity, even in the best characters, and which the best characters
most sensibly feel, and most feelingly deplore, as on those errors which
are often tolerated, justified, and in some instances systematized.

"If I have been altogether deceived in the ambitious hope that these
pages may not be entirely useless; if I have failed in my endeavors to
show how religion may be brought to mix with the concerns of ordinary
life, without impairing its activity, lessening its cheerfulness, or
diminishing its usefulness; if I have erred in fancying that material
defects exist in fashionable education; if I have been wrong in
supposing that females of the higher class may combine more domestic
knowledge with more intellectual acquirement, that they may be at the
same time more knowing and more useful, than has always been thought
necessary or compatible; in short, if I shall be found to have totally
disappointed you, my friend, in your too sanguine opinion that some
little benefit might arise from the publication, I shall rest satisfied
with a low and negative merit. I must be content with the humble hope
that no part of these volumes will be found injurious to the important
interests which it was rather in my wish than in my ability to advance;
that where I failed in effecting good, little evil has been done; that
if my book has answered no valuable purpose, it has, at least, not added
to the number of those publications which, by impairing the virtue, have
diminished the happiness of mankind; that if I possessed not talents to
promote the cause of Christian morals, I possessed an abhorrence of
those principles which lead to their contamination.

"C[OE]LEBS."

C[OE]LEBS.

CHAPTER I.

I have been sometimes surprised when in conversation I have been
expressing my admiration of the character of Eve in her state of
innocence, as drawn by our immortal poet, to hear objections started by
those, from whom of all critics I should have least expected it--the
ladies. I confess that as the Sophia of Rousseau had her young
imagination captivated by the character of Fenelon's Telemachus, so I
early became enamored of that of Milton's Eve. I never formed an idea of
conjugal happiness, but my mind involuntarily adverted to the graces of
that finished picture.

The ladies, in order to justify their censure, assert that Milton,