“This conduct hath something in it very acute. For nothing is more dangerous than to expose a young woman to know love by an interested person's mouth, who far from making her observe the troubles that follow this passion, hath no greater care than to hide them from her. So that it is very hard that a young person should resist love, whilst never hearing mention made of it, she begins to know it by that which is taking in it: and how shall she defend herself from a passion which only promisseth sweetnesses, and which offers such pleasing baits!” It appears that there is a chapter devoted to the faults of young women. “Mr. Abbot Feuelon says that they must be corrected for those tears they shed {654} so cheap,” and that “they have always been reproached with a marvellous talent of speaking;” but he endangers the cure of the first offence, by admitting that “a handsome woman, when she is in tears, is by the half more handsome.” The reviewer states that the Abbot does not spare them for those “precipitate decisions of the curious ladies, which so much displease men of good judgment. A poor man of a Province, saith he, will be the ridicule of five or six _a-la-mode_ ladies, because his peruke is not of the best make, or because he wants a good grace, though he hath an upright heart, and a mind just and solid: when a courtier is preferred, whose whole deserts consist in fashions and cooks, and who hideth a low heart and false mind under an exterior politeness. “Finally, he inveighs mightily against the vanity of women, their violent desire of pleasing, and the passion of dressing themselves, which they make their most important business. He pretends that this haughtiness draws after it the ruin of families, and the corruption of manners; and he neatly decides _that Beauty is noisome, if it doth not advantageously serve, to marry a young woman_”—which sentence the reviewer pronounces to be a little rigorous, and refutes at considerable length.