HARRIOT HENLY.
To Miss HARRIOT HENLY.
(Enclosed in the preceding.)
Boston.
Where are you, Harriot; and what are you doing? Six long months absent from the town! What can you find to beguile the tedious hours? Life must be a burden to you! How can you employ yourself? Employ, did I say? Pho! I will not use so vulgar a term! I meant amuse! Amusement surely is the prime end of our existence! You have no plays, no card-parties, nor assemblies, that are worth mentioning! Intolerably heavy must the lagging wheels of time roll on! How shall I accelerate them for you? A new novel may do something towards it! I accordingly send you one, imported in the last ships. Foreign, to be sure; else it would not be worth attention. They have attained to a far greater degree of refinement in the old world, than we have in the new; and are so perfectly acquainted with the passions, that there is something extremely amusing and interesting in their plots and counterplots, operating in various ways, till the dear creatures are jumbled into matrimony in the prettiest manner that can be conceived!
We, in this country, are too much in a state of nature to write good novels yet. An American novel is such a moral, sentimental thing, that it is enough to give any body the vapours to read one. Pray come to town as soon as possible, and not dream away your best days in obscurity and insignificance.
But this boarding school, this Harmony-Grove, where you formerly resided, has given you strange ideas of the world. With what raptures I have heard you relate the dull scenes in which you were concerned there! I am afraid that your diseased taste has now come to a crisis, and you have commenced prude in earnest! But return to your city friends; and we will lend our charitable assistance, in restoring you to gaiety and pleasure.
AMELIA PARR.
The Answer.