gives them a taste for refinement, which divests their young hearts
of almost every other feeling, renders their tempers desultory and
capricious, regulates their dress only by the most fantastic models of
finery and fashion, and makes their company rather tiresome and awkward,
than pleasing or elegant.

No one perhaps can form a more ludicrous contrast to every thing just
and graceful in nature, than the woman whose sole object in life is to
pass for a _fine lady_. The attentions she every where and uniformly
pays, expects, and even exacts, are tedious and fatiguing. Her various
movements and attitudes are all adjusted and exhibited by rule. By a
happy fluency of the most eloquent language, she has the art of
imparting a momentary dignity and grace to the merest trifles. Studious
only to mimic such peculiarities as are most admired in others, she
affects a loquacity peculiarly flippant and teazing because scandal,
routs, finery, fans, china, lovers, lap-dogs, or squirrels, are her
constant themes. Her amusements, like those of a magpie, are only
hopping over the same spots, prying into the same corners, and devouring
the same species of prey. The simple and beautiful delineations of
nature, in her countenance, gestures and whole deportment, are
habitually arranged, distorted, or concealed, by the affected adoption
of whatever grimace or deformity is latest or most in vogue.

She accustoms her face to a simper, which every separate feature in it
belies. She spoils, perhaps, a blooming complexion with a profusion of
artificial coloring, she distorts the most exquisite shape by loads or
volumes of useless drapery. She has her head, her arms, her feet, and
her gait, equally touched by art and affectation, into what is called
the _taste_, the _ton_, or the _fashion_.

She little considers to what a torrent of ridicule and sarcasm this mode
of conduct exposes her; or how exceedingly cold and hollow that ceremony
must be, which is not the language of a warm heart. She does not reflect
how insipid those smiles are, which indicate no internal pleasantry; nor
how awkward those graces, which spring not from habits of good-nature
and benevolence. Thus, pertness succeeds to delicacy, assurance to
modesty, and all the vagaries of a listless to the sensibilities of an
ingenuous mind.

With her, punctilio is politeness; dissipation, life; and levity,
spirit. The miserable and contemptible drudge of every tawdry innovation
in dress