The character, however, of the women in most other parts of Germany, particularly of the Austrian, is very different from this. Notwithstanding the advantages of size and make, their looks and features, though not unsightly, betray a vacancy of that life and spirit, without which beauty is uninteresting, and, like a mere picture, becomes utterly void of that indication of sensibility, which alone can awaken a delicacy of feeling. As their education is conducted by the rules of the grossest superstition, and they are taught little else than set forms of devotion, they arrive to the years of maturity uninstructed in the use of reason, and usually continue profoundly ignorant the remainder of their days, which are spent, or rather loitered away, in apathy and indolence. The principal happiness of the Austrian ladies of fashion consists in ruminating on the dignity of their birth and families, the antiquity of their race, the rank they hold, the respect attached to it, and the prerogatives they enjoy over the inferior classes, whom they treat with the utmost superciliousness, and hold in the most unreasonable contempt. In the mean time, their domestic affairs are condemned to the most unaccountable neglect. They dwell at home, careless of what passes there; and suffer disorder and confusion to prevail, without feeling the least uneasiness. Great frequenters of churches, their piety consists in the strictest conformity to all the externals of religion. They profess the most boundless belief in all the silly legends with which their treatises of devotion are filled; and these are the only books they ever read. The coldness of their constitution occasions a species of regulated gallantry, which is rather the effect of an opinion that it is an appendage of high life, than the result of their natural inclination. It must, at the same time be allowed, that the Austrian women are endowed with a great fund of sincerity and candor; and, though too much on the reserve, and prone to keep at an unnecessary distance, are yet capable of the truest attachment, and always warm and zealous in the cause of those whom they have admitted to their friendship. Though the Germans are rather a dull and phlegmatic people, and not greatly enslaved by the warmer passions, yet at the court of Vienna they are much given to intrigue: and an amour is so far from being scandalous, that a woman gains credit by the rank of her gallant, and is reckoned silly and unfashionable if she scrupulously adheres to the virtue of chastity. But such customs are more the customs of courts, than of places less exposed to temptation, and consequently less dissolute; and we are well assured that in Germany there are many women who do honor to humanity, not by chastity only, but also by a variety of other virtues.