always be found more useful than that of a plaything, the amusement of an idle hour.


'No person of sense, man or woman, will venture to launch out on a subject with which they are not well acquainted. The lesser degree of knowlege will give place to the greater. This will secure subordination enough. For the advantages of education which men must necessarily have over women, if they have made the proper use of them, will have set them so forward on the race, that we can never overtake them. But then don't let them despise us for this, as if their superiority were entirely founded on a natural difference of capacity! Despise us as women, and value themselves merely as men: For it is not the hat or cap which covers the head, that decides of the merit of it.


'In the general course of the things of this world, women have not opportunities of sounding the depths of science, or of acquainting themselves perfectly with polite literature: But this want of opportunity is not entirely confined to them. There are professions among the men no more favourable to these studies, than the common avocations of women. For example; merchants, whose attention is (and perhaps more usefully, as to public utility) chained down to their accounts. Officers, both of land and sea, are seldom much better instructed, tho' they may perhaps, pass through a few more forms: And as for knowlege of the world, women of a certain rank have an equal title to it with some of them. A learned man, as he is called, who should despise a sensible one of these professions, and disdain to converse with him, would pass for a pedant; and why not for despising

or undervaluing a woman of sense, who may be put on the same footing? Men, in common conversation, have laid it down for a rule of good breeding, not to talk before women of things they don't understand; by which means, an opportunity of improvement is lost; a very good one too; one that has been approved by the ablest persons who have written on the education of children, because it is a means of learning insensibly, without the appearance of a task. Common subjects afford only commonplace, and are soon exhausted: Why, then, should conversation be confined to such narrow limits, and be liable to continual repetition; when, if people would start less beaten subjects, many doubts and difficulties concerning them might be cleared up, and they would acquire a more settled opinion of things (which is