Tenthly, it occasions enmities and the fatal consequences resulting therefrom. Eleventhly, husbands by such speeches may be led to suspect their wives, to use them ill, to desert them, and peradventure to make away with them. Twelfthly, a man thereby obtains the character of being a slanderer. Thirteenthly, he brings himself in jeopardy with those who may think themselves bound to vindicate a lady's reputation or revenge the wrong which has been done to it. Fourteenthly, to speak ill of women is a sin because of the beauty which distinguishes their sex, which beauty is so admirable that there is more to praise in one woman than there can be to condemn in all. Fifteenthly, it is a sin because all the benefactors of mankind have been born of women, and therefore we are obliged to women for all the good that has ever been done in the world. Such are the fifteen reasons which Diego de San Pedro excogitated to show that it is wrong for men to speak ill of women; and the twenty reasons which he has superinduced to prove that they are bound to speak well of them are equally cogent and not less curious. I have a reason of my own for reserving these till another opportunity. Not however to disappoint my fair readers altogether of that due praise which they have so properly expected, I will conclude the present chapter with a few flowers taken from the pulpit of my old acquaintance Adam Littleton. There is no impropriety in calling him so, though he died before my grandfathers and grandmothers were born; and when I meet him in the next world I hope to improve this one sided acquaintance by introducing myself and thanking him for his Dictionary and his Sermons. The passage occurs in a sermon preached at the obsequies of the Right Honourable the Lady Jane Cheyne. The text was “Favour is deceitful, and Beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised:” in which proposition, says the Preacher, we have first the subject, _Woman_, with her qualification _that fears the Lord_: Secondly the predicate, _she shall be praised_. “WOMAN, in the primitive design of Nature, God's master-piece, being the last work of creation, and made with a great deal of deliberation and solemnity. “For to look upon her as a supernumerary creature, and one brought into the world by the bye, besides the Creator's first intention, upon second thoughts,—is to lay a foul imputation upon Divine Wisdom, as if it had been at a stand, and were to seek. “Wherefore, as we use to argue that all things were made for the use and service of man, because he was made last of all; I do not see, if that argument be good, why the same consequences should not be of like force here too, that Man himself was made for the affectionate care of Woman, who was framed not only _after_ him, but _out of_ him too, the more to engage his tenderest and dearest respects.