How would Clarissa’s delicacy have been shock’d and disgusted, had brother James laid his commands upon her to rub down Mr. Solmes! nor would that office have been in the least less disagreeable, had she been to perform it on the handsome person of Bob Lovelace; she would have sooner died, than have done it to either. Again, in the sixth Odyssey, when Ulysses, awakened by the noise which Nausicaa and her nymphs make at their sports, comes quite naked out of her hiding place; the nymphs, indeed, run away, not at the sight of a naked man, but for fear of an enemy, while the princess stays, and, without betraying the least disgust or uneasiness at his appearance, holds a long conversation with him, calls back her fugitive companions, and reprimands them very sharply for their timorousness. Had such an adventure, Sir, happened to your Harriet, how do you think she would have behaved? she who was not able, without the utmost palpitation, nor unless her trembling hand had been guided, to sign the marriage articles with her beloved Grandison. Instead of giving assistance to the naked hero, she would have wanted help herself; the _dear creature_ would have fainted away. Among the northern nations in America, who lead a simple life, and where conjugal fidelity is very strictly observed, it is customary for parents to provide their guests with companions for the night in the persons of their daughters. They reckon it a necessary branch of hospitable duty, and the young ladies think themselves affronted, if their embraces are rejected. Had Pamela and Clarissa been bred up near the great lake of Hurons, they would have gone to bed to Booby and Lovelace, without any scruple, had they come to their father’s houses, in the character of English envoys; and had an Iroquois damsel received her education in Northamptonshire, under the wings of grandmamma Shirley, and kept company constantly with Lucy and Nancy Selby, she would have been as delicate as Harriet herself. From whence does this mighty difference proceed, among creatures of the same species, all endued with the same passions, appetites, and desires? Undoubtedly from custom, habit, and education; and the reason that women of candid and open dispositions, who can freely examine into themselves, are never sensible of it, and cannot make the discovery, is this; they feel these principles immoveably rooted in their minds, and they had received them so early, that they never remember the time when they had them not. This chastity, this delicacy, _&c._ may probably enough be termed political; some people have reckoned it the meer invention of the statesman or politician; but, as I observed before, its fitness and propriety are founded on the nature of things and of human society. In all societies there are families, inheritances, and distinctions of ranks and orders. To keep these separate and distinct, to prevent them from falling into confusion, on all which the good oeconomy