“Fie, Madam,” replied she, a little abashed, “how can you expose your kinswoman thus, before the dean and Mrs. B.?”

“Mrs. Towers,” said I, “only says this to provoke you to shew your collections.  I wish I had the pleasure of seeing them.  I doubt not but your common-place book is a store-house of wisdom.”

“There is nothing bad in it, I hope,” replied she; “but I would not, that Mrs. B. should see it for the world.  But, Madam” (to Mrs. Towers), “there are many beautiful things, and good instructions, to be collected from novels and plays, and romances; and from the poetical writers particularly, light as you are pleased to make of them.  Pray, Madam” (to me), “have you ever been at all conversant in such writers?”

“Not a great deal in the former:  there were very few novels and romances that my lady would permit me to read; and those I did, gave me no great pleasure; for either they dealt so much in the marvellous and improbable, or were so unnaturally inflaming to the passions, and so full of love and intrigue, that most of them seemed calculated to fire the imagination, rather than to inform the judgment. Titles and tournaments, breaking of spears in honour of a mistress, engaging with monsters, rambling in search of adventures, making unnatural difficulties, in order to shew the knight-errant’s prowess in overcoming them, is all that is required to constitute the hero in such pieces.  And what principally distinguishes the character of the heroine is, when she is taught to consider her father’s house as an enchanted castle, and her lover as the hero who is to dissolve the charm, and to set at liberty from one confinement, in order to put her into another, and, too probably, a worse:  to instruct her how to climb walls, leap precipices, and do twenty other extravagant things, in order to shew the mad strength of a passion she ought to be ashamed of; to make parents and guardians pass for tyrants, the voice of reason to be drowned in that of indiscreet love, which exalts the other sex, and debases her own.  And what is the instruction that can be gathered from such pieces, for the conduct of common life?

“Then have I been ready to quarrel with these writers for another reason; and that is, the dangerous notion which they hardly ever fail to propagate, of a first-sight love.  For there is such a susceptibility supposed on both sides (which, however it may pass in a man, very little becomes the female delicacy) that they are smitten with a glance:  the fictitious blind god is made a real divinity:  and too often prudence and discretion are the first offerings at his shrine.”

“I believe, Madam,” said Miss Stapylton, blushing, and playing with her fan, “there have been many instances of people’s loving at first sight, which have ended very happily.”