and particularly for their sobriety, for fear of following their example in which men drive them from the table, as if they said to them:  ’You have had enough; food is sufficient for you; but we must remain to fill ourselves with drink, and to talk in language which your ears ought not to endure.’  When women are getting up to retire from the table, men rise in honour of them; but they take special care not to follow their excellent example.  That which is not fit to be uttered before women is not fit to be uttered at all; and it is next to a proclamation, tolerating drunkenness and indecency, to send women from the table the moment they have swallowed their food.  The practice has been ascribed to a desire to leave them to themselves; but why should they be left to themselves?  Their conversation is always the most lively, while their persons are generally the most agreeable objects.  No:  the plain truth is, that it is the love of the drink and of the indecent talk that send women from the table; and it is a practice which I have always abhorred.  I like to see young men, especially, follow them out of the room, and prefer their company to that of the sots who are left behind.

74.  Another mode of spending the leisure time is that of books.  Rational and well-informed companions may be still more instructive; but books never annoy; they cost little; and they are always at hand, and ready at your call.  The sort of books must, in some degree, depend upon your pursuit in life; but there are some books necessary to every one who aims at the character of a well-informed man.  I have slightly mentioned HISTORY and Geography in the preceding letter; but I must here observe, that, as to both these, you should begin with your own country, and make yourself well acquainted, not only with its ancient state, but with the origin of all its principal institutions.  To read of the battles which it has fought, and of the intrigues by which one king or one minister has succeeded another, is very little more profitable than the reading of a romance.  To understand well the history of the country, you should first understand how it came to be divided into counties, hundreds, and into parishes; how judges, sheriffs, and juries, first arose; to what end they were all invented, and how the changes with respect to any of them have been produced.  But it is of particular consequence that you ascertain the state of the people in former times, which is to be ascertained by comparing the then price of labour with the then price of food.  You hear enough, and you read enough, about the glorious wars in the reign of KING EDWARD the THIRD; and it is very proper that those glories should be recorded and remembered; but you never read, in the works of the historians, that, in that reign, a common labourer earned threepence-halfpenny a day; and that a fat sheep was sold, at the same time, for one shilling and twopence, and a fat hog, two years old, for three