Nature, herself, then, has disqualified women from fighting and from entering into the fierce contentions of the prickly and crooked ways of politics. There is a silent and beautiful education which Heaven intended that all alike should learn from mothers, sisters, and wives. Each home was meant to have in their gentler presence a softening and refining element, so that strength should train itself to be submissive, rudeness should become abashed, and coarse passions held in check by the natural influence of women. High or low, educated or uneducated, there is the proper work of the weaker sex. And, finally, we venture to address her in the words of Lord Lyttelton:—
“Seek to be good, but aim not to be great;
A woman’s noblest station is retreat;
Her fairest virtues fly from public sight;
Domestic worth—that shuns too strong a light.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] An anecdote of her has been preserved which proves how very general was the impression the grace and beauty of the Duchess of Devonshire made upon men in every station of society. On one occasion of her being present on the racecourse at Newmarket, a burly farmer who stood near her carriage, after having for some time gazed at her in a species of ecstasy, exclaimed aloud, “Ah! why am I not God Almighty?—she should then be Queen of Heaven!” The Duchess preserved her personal charms far beyond the period of life when they commonly disappear among women, though she lost one of her eyes a few years before her death in 1806.
BOOK I.
PART I.