ABSTRACT
To MR. FITZ-ADAM SIR, You cannot do a greater service to the world, than by promoting the real happiness of the best part of it, the fair sex; for whose sake I beg you will publish the following animadversions upon an error in education, which the good sense of the present age, with all its attachments to nature, has not totally eradicated. The error I mean is putting romances into the hands of young ladies; which being a sort of writing that abounds in characters no where to be found, can, at best, be but a useless employment, even supposing the readers of them to have neither relish nor understanding for superior concerns. But as this is by no means the case, and as the happiness of mankind is deeply interested in the sentiments and conduct of the ladies, why do we contribute to the filling their heads with fancies, which render them incapable either of enjoying or communicating that happiness? Why do we suffer those hearts, which ought to be appropriated to the various affections of social life, to be alienated by the mere creatures of the imagination? In short, why do we suffer those who were born for the purpose of living in society with men endued with passions and frailties like their own, to be bred up in daily expectation of living out of it with such men as never have existed? Believe me, Mr. Fitz-Adam (as much as the age of nature as this is thought to be), I know several unmarried ladies, who in all probability had been long ago good wives and good mothers, if their imaginations had not been early perverted with the chimerical ideas of romantic love, and themselves cheated out of the charities (as Milton calls them),1 and all the real blessings of those relations, by the hopes of that ideal happiness, which is no where to be found but in romances.
