“Let it, therefore, be known to those who court your favor by an ostentatious parade of admiration and obsequiousness, that their dissimulation and duplicity are discovered, and that you are superior to such futility.
“In order to discriminate between flattery and merited praise, critically examine your own heart and life. By this mean you will ascertain what is really your due, and what is merely the effect of this insidious art. But let no ideas of your own endowments, however just, elate you with an opinion of your superior powers of pleasing.
“Be not ostentatious of your charms, either of person or mind. Let modesty, diffidence, and propriety regulate you, in regard to each. Exalted advantages will render you an object of envy to the weak minded of your own sex, and of satire to the ill-natured part of the other. Never obtrude even your real graces and accomplishments upon the world. The penetrating and judicious will see and applaud them, while retiring from the gaze of a misjudging and misrepresenting throng.
“Naked in nothing should a woman be,
But veil her very wit with modesty;
Let man discover; let her not display;
But yield her charms of mind with sweet delay.”
“Those who are solicitous for beauty should remember that the expression of the countenance, in which its very essence consists, depends on the disposition of the mind.
“What’s female beauty, but an air divine,
Through which the mind’s all gentle graces shine?