What good can I do? should be the first inquiry.  It is Christianity alone that teaches the ultimate laws of morals.  Hannah More would subject every impulse and every pursuit and every study to these ultimate laws as a foundation for true and desirable knowledge.  She would repress everything which looks like vanity.  She would educate girls for their homes, and not for a crowd; for usefulness, and not for admiration; for that; period of life when external beauty is faded or lost.  She thinks more highly of solid attainments than of accomplishments, and would incite to useful rather than unnecessary works.  She would have a girl learn the languages, though she deems them of little value unless one can think in them.  She would cultivate that “sensibility which has its seat in the heart, rather than the nerves.”  Anything which detracts from modesty and delicacy, and makes a girl bold, forward, and pushing, she severely rebukes.  She would check all extravagance in dancing, and would not waste much time on music unless one has a talent for it.  She thinks that the excessive cultivation of the arts has contributed to the decline of States.  She is severe on that style of dress which permits an indelicate exposure of the person, and on all forms of senseless extravagance.  She despises children’s balls, and ridicules children’s rights and “Liliputian coquetry” with ribbons and feathers.  She would educate women to fulfil the duties of daughters, wives, and mothers rather than to make them dancers, singers, players, painters, and actresses.  She maintains that when a man of sense comes to marry, he wants a companion rather than a creature who can only dress and dance and play upon an instrument.  Yet she does not discourage ornamental talent; she admits it is a good thing, but not the best thing that a woman has.  She would not cut up time into an endless multiplicity of employments, She urges mothers to impress on their daughters’ minds a discriminating estimate of personal beauty, so that they may not have their heads turned by the adulation that men are so prone to lavish on those who are beautiful.  While she deprecates harshness, she insists on a rigorous discipline.  She would stimulate industry and the cultivation of moderate abilities, as more likely to win in the long race of life,—­even as a barren soil and ungenial climate have generally produced the most thrifty people.  She would banish frivolous books which give only superficial knowledge, and even those abridgments and compendiums which form too considerable a part of ordinary libraries, and recommends instead those works which exercise the reasoning faculties and stir up the powers of the mind.  She expresses great contempt for English sentimentality, French philosophy, Italian poetry, and German mysticism, and is scarcely less severe on the novels of her day, which stimulate the imagination without adding to knowledge.  She recommends history as the most improving of all studies, both as a revelation of the ways of Providence and as tending to the enlargement of the mind.  She insists on accuracy in language and on avoiding exaggerations.  She inculcates co-operation with man, and not rivalry or struggle for power.  What she says about women’s rights—­which, it seems, was a question that agitated even her age—­is worth quoting, since it is a woman, and not a man, who speaks:—­