Yet such Virginias are our Virginias! and to see a modest, abashed, retiring, blushing girl enter one of our assemblies, is as uncommon a sight as now and then an embassy from a foreign land. The modern taste for exhibitions of all kinds is the chief source of this depravity; a girl is no longer taught to dance that she may move easily in the occasional festivities of her neighborhood, and enjoy the graceful exercise of a birth-day or a race ball, without annoying the movements of her companions. No! these are not sufficient: she takes her lessons of the _corps de ballet_, that she may present herself in the ball-room or on a stage; and while the motions of her limbs, and the exposure of her person, scandalize every discreet matron present, she believes herself the object of general admiration, the very _ne plus ultra_ of the art. In like manner, her musical talents are cultivated. She does not learn to compose, with her sweet lullaby, the unquiet hours of old age or of sickness, to rest and sleep: enough for her relations, father, brothers, husband, that she practises all day the crude and disagreeable parts of her lessons. It is for the guest, the gay assembly, the concert of _amateurs_, that she reserves her harmonies; and to them she sings and plays till she believes _herself_ the tenth muse, and _them_ her adorers. Can we be surprised that from such an education should be produced the vain, the conceited, the presumptuous, the impudent? To check this growing evil, by showing the young candidate for admiration what is “woman’s best knowledge and her praise;” to show her what is indeed the proper, the graceful, the winning deportment, is the design of these few following pages; and I trust that my young reader will receive them as the admonition of a tender and experienced parent, and not allow “a mother’s precepts to be vain!” Having laid it down as a first principle, that no demeanor, whether in a princess or a country girl, can be becoming that is not grounded in _feminine delicacy_, I shall proceed to show, that a different deportment is expected from different persons. Certain characteristics of persons are suited to certain styles of manner; and also the same demeanor does not agree as well with the steward’s daughter as the squire’s bride. As in a former chapter I have particularized the dresses which are adapted to the gay and the grave, so in the next I propose pointing out the appropriate miens which belong to the various degrees of beauty and classes of society. PECULIARITIES IN CARRIAGE AND DEMEANOR. “By her graceful walk, the Queen of Love is known.” VIRGIL. As order is the beautiful harmonizer of the universe, so consistency is the graceful combiner of all that is in woman to perfection.