Mention the name of an abfent Lady, and it is ten to one but you learn fomething of her gown and petticoat. A ball is a great help to discourse, and a birth-day furnishes conversation for a twelvemonth after. A furbelow of precious stones, an hat buttoned with a diamond, a brocade waistcoat or petticoat, are standing topics. In short, they confider only the drapery of the species, and never caft away a thought on those ornaments of the mind ⚫ that make persons illustrious in themselves, and ufeful to others. When women are thus perpetually dazzling one another's imaginations, and filling their heads with nothing but colours, it is no wonder that they are more attentive to the fuperficial parts of life, than the folid and substantial blessings of it. A girl who has been trained up in this kind of conversation, is in danger of every embroidered coat that comes in her way. A pair of fringed gloves may be her ruin. In a word, lace and ribbands, filver and gold galloons, with the like glittering gewgaws, are so many lures to women of weak minds or low educations; and, when artificially difplayed, are able to fetch down the most airy coquette from the wildest of her flights and rambles. True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's felf; and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few felect companions: It loves fhade and folitude, and naturally haunts groves and fountains, fields and meadows: In short, it feels every thing it wants within itself, and receives no addition from multitudes of witnesses and spectators. On the contrary, false happiness loves to be in a crowd, and to draw the eyes of the world upon her. She does not receive any fatisfaction from the applaufes which she gives herself, but from the admiration which the raises in others. She flourishes in courts and and palaces, theatres, and assemblies, and has no existence, but when she is looked upon. Aurelia, though a woman of great quality, delights in the privacy of a country life, and paffes away a great part of her time in her own walks and gardens. Her husband, who is her bosom friend and companion in her folitudes, has been in love with her ever fince he knew her. They both abound with good sense, confummate virtue, and a mutual esteem; and are a perpetual entertainment to one another. Their family is under so regular an oeconomy, in its hours of devotion and repast, employment and diversion, that it looks like a little commonwealth within itself. They often go into company, that they may return with the greater delight to one another; and fometimes live in town not to enjoy it so properly as to grow weary of it, that they may renew in themselves the relish of a country life. By this means they are happy in each other, beloved by their children, adored by their servants, and are become the envy, or rather the delight of all that know them. How different to this is the life of Fulvia! She confiders her husband as her steward, and looks upon difcretion and good housewifery as little domestic virtues, unbecoming a woman of quality. She thinks life lost in her own family, and fancies herself out of the world, when she is not in the ring, the play-house, or the drawingroom: She lives in a perpetual motion of body, and restleffness of thought, and is never easy in any one place, when she thinks there is more company in another. The miffing of an opera the first night, would be more afflicting to her than the death of a child. She pities all the valuable part of her own fex, and calls every woman of a prudent, modeft, and retired life, a poor-fpirited unpolished creature. What a mortification would it be to Fulvia, if the knew that her setting herself to view is but expofing herself, 2 herself, and that the grows contemptible by being confpicuous. I cannot conclude my paper without observing, that Virgil has very finely touched upon this female paffion for dress and show, in the character of Camilla; who, though she seems to have shaken off all the other weaknesses of her fex, is still defcribed as a woman in this particular. The poet. tells us, that after having made a great flaughter of the enemy, the unfortunately cast her eye on a Trojan, who wore an embroidered tunick, a beautiful coat of mail, with a mantle of the finest purple. A golden bow, fays he, hung upon his shoulder; his garment was buckled with a golden clasp, and his head was covered with an helmet of the same shining metal. The Amazon immediately singled out this well-dreffed warrior, being feized with a woman's longing for the pretty trappings that he was adoried with: -Totumque incauta per agmen Fæmineo præda & spoliorum ardebat amore. Æn. xi. ver. 782. This heedless pursuit after these glittering trifles, the poet (by a nice concealed moral) represents to have been the destruction of his female hero. C N° 16. MONDAY, MARCH 19. Quod verum atque decens curo & rogo, & omnis in HOR. Ep. i. 1. 1. ver. 11. hoc fum. What right, what true, what fit we justly call, Let this be all my care - for this is all. POPE. IHAVE received a letter, defiring me to be very fatirical upon the little muff that is now in fashion; another informs me of a pair of filver garters buck led led below the knee, that have been lately seen at the Rainbow coffee-house in Fleetstreet; a third fends me an heavy complaint against fringed gloves. To be brief, there is scarce an ornament of either fex which one or other of my correfpondents has not inveighed againft with some bitterness, and recommended to my observation. I must therefore, once for all, inform my readers, that it is not my intention to fink the dignity of this my paper with reflections upon red heels or top-knots, but rather to enter into the passions of mankind, and to correct those depraved sentiments that give birth to all those little extravagancies which appear in their outward dress and behaviour. Foppish and fantastic ornaments are only indications of vice, not criminal in themselves. Extinguish vanity in the mind, and you naturally retrench the little fuperfluities of garniture and equipage. The blossoms will fall of themselves, when the root that nourishes them is destroyed. I shall therefore, as I have faid, apply my remedies to the first seeds and principles of an affected dress, without defcending to the dress itself; tho' at the fame time I must own, that I have thoughts of creating an officer under me, to be intitled, The Cenfor of Small Wares, and of alloting him one day in a week for the execution of fuch his office. An operator of this nature might act under me, with the fame regard as a furgeon to a physician; the one might be employed in healing those blotches and tumours which break out in the body, while the other is sweetening the blood and rectifying the conftitution. To speak truly, the young people of both fexes are so wonderfully apt to shoot out into long fwords or sweeping trains, bushy head-dreffes or full-bottomed periwigs, with several other incumberances of dress, that they stand in need of being pruned very frequently, left they should be oppreffed with ornaments, and over-run with the luxuriance of their habits. I am much in doubt, whether I should give the preference to a quaker that is trimmed close, and almost cut to the quick, or to a beau that is loaden with fuch a redundance of excreffences. I must therefore defire my correfpondents to let me know how they approve my project, and whether they think the erecting of fuch a petty cenforship inay not turn to the emolument of the publick; for I would not do any thing of this nature rafhly and without advice. There is another set of correfpondents to whom I must address myself in the second place: I mean fuch as fill their letters with private scandal and black accounts of particular perfons and families. The world is fo full of ill-nature, that I have lampoons fent me by people who cannot spell, and faeives composed by those who fcarce know how to write. By the last post, in particular, I received a packet of scandal which is not legible; and have a whole bundle of letters in womens hands that are full of blots and calumnies, infomuch, that, when I fee the name Galia, Phillis, Pastora, or the like, at the bottom of a scrawl, I conclude on course that it brings me some account of a fallen virgin, a faithless wife, or an amorous widow. I must therefore inform these my correfpondents, that it is not my defign to be a publisher of intrigues and cuckoldoms, or to bring little infamous stories out of their present lurking-holes into broad day-light. If I attack the vicious, I shall only fet upon them in a body; and will not be provoked by the worst usage I can receive from others, to make an example of any particular criminals. In short, I have fo much of a Drawcanfir in me, that I thall pass over a fingle foe to charge whole armies. It is not Lais nor Silenus, but the harlot and the drunkard, whom I shall endeavour to expose; and shall confider the crime as it appears in a species, not as it is circumstanced in an individual. I think it was Caligula who wished the |