A Father's Legacy to His Daughters

To face the Title T. Stothard delin. R. Cromek sculp. pupil of F. Bartolozzi R.A. Religion. Published March 1st. 1797, by Cadell and Davies Strand.
A FATHER’s LEGACY TO HIS DAUGHTERS.
By the late DR. GREGORY, of Edinburgh.
A NEW EDITION.
ILLUSTRATED WITH PLATES.
LONDON:
Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, Strand; J. Walker, and Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster Row; Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, Poultry; Scatcherd and Letterman, Avemaria Lane; Lackington, Allen, and Co., Finsbury Square; B. Crosby, Stationer’s Court; J. Booker, New Bond Street; and J. Asperne, Cornhill.
1808.
Wood & Innes, Printers, Poppin’s Court, Fleet Street.
That the subsequent Letters were written by a tender father, in a declining state of health, for the instruction of his daughters, and not intended for the Public, is a circumstance which will recommend them to every one who considers them in the light of admonition and advice. In such domestic intercourse, no sacrifices are made to prejudices, to customs, to fashionable opinions. Paternal love, paternal care, speak their genuine sentiments, undisguised and unrestrained. A father’s zeal for his daughter’s improvement in whatever can make a woman amiable, with a father’s quick apprehension of the dangers that too often arise, even from the attainment of that very point, suggest his admonitions, and render him attentive to a thousand little graces and little decorums, which would escape the nicest moralist who should undertake the subject on uninterested speculation. Every faculty is on the alarm, when the objects of such tender affection are concerned.
In the writer of these Letters, paternal tenderness and vigilance were doubled, as he was at that time sole parent; death having before deprived the young ladies of their excellent mother. His own precarious state of health inspired him with the most tender solicitude for their future welfare; and though he might have concluded, that the impression made by his instruction and uniform example could never be effaced from the memory of his children, yet his anxiety for their orphan condition suggested to him this method of continuing to them those advantages.