To form the manners of men, various causes contribute; but nothing, perhaps, so much as the turn of the women with whom they converse. Those who are most conversant with women of virtue and understanding, will be always found the most amiable characters, other circumstances being supposed alike. Such society, beyond every thing else, rubs off the corners that gives many of our sex an ungracious roughness. It produces a polish more perfect, and more pleasing than that which is received from a general commerce with the world. This last is often specious, but commonly superficial. The other is the result of gentler feelings, and more humanity. The heart itself is moulded. Habits of undissembled courtesy are formed. A certain flowing urbanity is acquired. Violent passions, rash oaths, coarse jests, indelicate language of every kind, are precluded and disrelished.
Female society gives men a taste for cleanliness and elegance of person. Our ancestors, [p88] who kept but little company with their women, were not only slovenly in their dress, but had their countenances disfigured with long beards. By female influence, however, beards were, in process of time, mutilated down to mustaches. As the gentlemen found that the ladies had no great relish for mustaches, which were the relics of a beard, they cut and curled them into various fashions, to render them more agreeable. At last, however, finding such labor vain, they gave them up altogether. But as those of the three learned professions were supposed to be endowed with, or at least to stand in need of, more wisdom than other people, and as the longest beard had always been deemed to sprout from the wisest chin, to supply this mark of distinction, which they had lost, they contrived to smother their heads in enormous quantities of frizzled hair, that they might bear greater resemblance to an owl, the bird sacred to wisdom and Minerva.
To female society it has been objected by the learned and studious, that it enervates the mind, and gives it such a turn for trifling, levity, and dissipation, as renders it altogether unfit for that application which is necessary in order to become eminent in any of the sciences. In proof of this they allege, that the greatest philosophers seldom or never were men who enjoyed, or were fit for, the company or conversation of women. Sir Isaac Newton hardly ever conversed with any of the sex. Bacon, Boyle, Des Cartes, and many others, conspicuous for their learning and [p89] application, were but indifferent companions to the fair.
It is certain, indeed, that the youth who devotes his whole time and attention to female conversation, and the little offices of gallantry, never distinguishes himself in the literary world. But notwithstanding this, without the fatigue and application of severe study, he often obtains, by female interest, that which is denied to the merited improvements acquired by the labor of many years.
MONASTIC LIFE.
The venerable Bede has given us a very striking picture of Monastic enormities, in his epistle to Egbert. From this we learn that many young men who had no title to the monastic profession, got possession of monasteries; where, instead of engaging in the defence of their country, as their age and rank required, they indulged themselves in the most dissolute indolence.
We learn from Dugdale, that in the reign of Henry the Second, the nuns of Amsbury abbey in Wiltshire were expelled from that religious house on account of their incontinence. And to exhibit in the most lively colors the total corruption of monastic chastity, bishop Burnet informs us in his “History of the Reformation,” that when the nunneries were visited by the command of Henry the VIII. “whole houses almost, were found whose vows had been made in vain.”
[p90]
When we consider to what oppressive indolence, to what a variety of wretchedness and guilt, the young and fair inhabitants of the cloister were frequently betrayed, we ought to admire those benevolent authors who, when the tide of religious prejudice ran very strong in favor of monastic virginity, had spirit enough to oppose the torrent, and to caution the devout and tender sex against so dangerous a profession. It is in this point of view that the character of Erasmus appears with the most amiable lustre; and his name ought to be eternally dear to the female world in particular. Though his studies and constitution led him almost to idolize those eloquent fathers of the church who have magnified this kind of life, his good sense and his accurate survey of the human race, enabled him to judge of the misery in which female youth was continually involved by a precipitate choice of the veil. He knew the successful arts by which the subtle and rapacious monks inveigled young women of opulent families into the cloister; and he exerted his lively and delicate wit in opposition to so pernicious an evil.
In those nations of Europe where nunneries still exist, how many lovely victims are continually sacrificed to the avarice or absurd ambition of inhuman parents! The misery of these victims has been painted with great force by some benevolent writers of France.