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Untitled Article
* How many of those gentle chaperons would shame even the wisdom of a Talleyrand . What open faces and secret hearts ! What schemes and ambushes in every word . If we look back to that early period in the history of our manners , when with us , as it still is in France , parents betrothed their children , and , instead of bringing them to public sale , effected a private compact of exchange , we shall not be
surprised to find that marriages were not less happy , nor women less domestic than at present . The custom of open match-making is productive of many consequences not sufficiently noticed : in the first place , it encourages the spirit of insincerity among all women , ' mothers and daughters , " a spirit that consists in perpetual scheming and perpetual hypocrisy ; it lowers the chivalric estimate of women
and damps with eternal suspicion the youthful tendency to lofty and honest love . In the next place , it assists to render the tone of society dull , low , and unintellectual ; it is not talent , it is not virtue , it is not even the graces and fascinations of manner that are sought by the fair dispensers of social reputation : no , it is the title and the rent-roll .
You do not lavish your invitations on the mast agreeable member of a family , but on the richest . The elder son is the great attraction . Nay , the more agreeable the man be , if poor and unmarried , the more dangerous he is considered ; you may admit him to acquaintanceship , but you jealously bar him from intimacy . Thus society is crowded with the insipid , and beset with the insincere . The women that give the tone to society take the tone from their favourites . The rich young man is to be flattered in order that he may be won ; to flatter him you seem to approve his pursuits ; you talk to him of balls and races ; you fear to alarm him by appearing his intellectual superior : you dread lest he should think you a blue ; you trust to beauty and a graceful folly to allure him , and you harmonize your mind into gentle dulness , that it may not jar upon his own .
* The ambition or women absorbed in these petty intrigues , and debased to this paltry level , possesses but little sympathy with the great objects of a masculine and noble intellect . They have , in general , a frigid conception of public virtue : they affect not to understand politics , and measure a man ' s genius by his success in getting on . With the women of ancient times , a patriot was an object of admiration ; with the women of ours , he is an object of horror . Speak against pensions , and they deem you disreputable ; become a placeman , and you are a person of consideration . Thus our women seldom exalt the ambition of public life . They are inimitable , however , in their consolation under its reverses/—vol . i . p . 138—140 .
From this description of that political indifference in women which ministers so largely to the political corruption of men , a just and honourable exception is made on behalf of those in the inferior classes of society . What would not the reforms be worth which should diffuse through their sex the spirit by which the y are animated . The author says , that any man who is acquainted with popular elections , knows that ' it is often by the honesty of the women that that of the men is preserved . How many poor men have we known who would have taken a
Untitled Article
Characteristics of English Arutocratfy . 595
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1833, page 595, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2622/page/11/
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