The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. I., No. 9, May, 1835Various
History
The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. I., No. 9, May, 1835
Various
American literature -- 19th century -- Periodicals
proud the man, love and courtship will in the civilized countries of
our globe soon infuse a degree of vanity, which will temper his
overweening pride and make him more social, more loquacious, more
attentive to all the little courtesies of life, and much more cheerful
than he was before. In all the Mahommedan countries, where woman is
bought and locked up, and the alternately sweet and painful
solicitudes of love and courtship are never known--how proud, how
taciturn, how forbidding, unsocial and grave, is the character of man!
In France, where the influence of women is very great, how entirely
opposite is his character; there, vanity is his predominant trait.
Montesquieu, in his "Lettres Persannes," makes Usbeck say to Ibben, in
a letter from Paris, on the characters of the French and Persians, "It
must be allowed that the seraglio is better adapted for health than
for pleasure. It is a dull uniform kind of life, where every thing
turns upon subjection and duty; their very pleasures are grave, and
their pastimes solemn; and they seldom taste them but as so many
tokens of authority and dependence. The men in Persia are not so gay
as the French; there is not that freedom of mind and that appearance
of content which I meet with here in persons of all ranks and estates.
It is still worse in Turkey, where there are families, in which from
father to son, not one of them ever laughed from the foundation of the
monarchy." Now these proud, taciturn, grave beings would at once be
changed, by giving full freedom to the females, and rendering it
necessary for each one to woo, to interest and to delight her whom he
would make his wife.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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