1.5S$ ON THE EDUCATION O1, YOUTH. :ber. To render this exercise pleasant, one of them always enter, twined the company with some useful author, while the rest were .at work ; every one had freedom and encouragement to start what question she pleased, and to make any remarks on the present subject ; that reading, working and conversation, might fill up the hour with variety and delight. Thus while their hands were making garments for themselves or for the poor, their minds were enriched with treasures of human and divine knowledge. At proper seasons the young ladies were instructed in the gayer accomplishments of their age : but they were taught to esteem the song and the dance, some of their meanest talents, because they are often forgotten in advanced years, and add but little to the virtue, the honour, or the happiness of life. Phronissa herself was sprightly and active, and she abhorred a slothful and lazy humour; therefore she constantly found out some inviting aid agreeable employment for her daughters, that they might hate idleness as a mischievous vice, and be trained up to an active and useful life. Yet she perpetually insinuated the superior delights of the closet, and tempted them by all divine me- thods to the love of devout retirement. Whensoever she seemed to distinguish them by any peculiar favours, it was generally upon some new indication of early piety, or some young practice of self - denying virtue. They were taught to receive visits in form, agreeable to the age ; and though they knew the modes of dress sufficiently to secure them from any thing aukward or unfashionable, yet their minds were so well furnished with richer variety, that they had no need to run to those poor and trivial topics, to exclude silence and dulness from the drawing -room. They would not give such an affront to the understandings of the ladies their visitants, as to treat them with such meanness and impertinence ; therefore all this sort of conversation was reserved, almost entirely, for the minutes appointed to the milliner and the tire- woman. Here I must publish it to their honour, to provoke the sex to imitation, that though they comported with the fashion in all their ornaments, so far as the fashion was modest, and could approve itself to reason or religion, yet Phronissa would not suffer their younger judgments so far to be imposed on by cus- tom, as that the mode should be entirely the measure of all decency to them. She knew there is such a thing as natural liar- mony and agreeableness ; in the beauties of colour and figure her delicacy of taste was exquisite; and where the mode run counter to nature, though she indulged her daughters to follow it in some innocent instances; because she loved not to be remark- ably singular in things of indifference, yet she took care always to teach them to distinguish gay folly and affected extravagance from natural decencies, both in furniture and in dress : Their
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