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Page 1
In an artless tale, without episodes, the mind of a woman, who has
thinking powers is displayed. The female organs have been thought too
weak for this arduous employment; and experience seems to justify the
assertion. Without arguing physically about _possibilities_--in a
fiction, such a being may be allowed to exist; whose grandeur is derived
from the operations of its own faculties, not subjugated to opinion; but
drawn by the individual from the original source.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote A: Rousseau.]
[Footnote B: I here give the Reviewers an opportunity of being very
witty about the Paradise of Fools, &c.]
MARY
CHAP. I.
Mary, the heroine of this fiction, was the daughter of Edward, who
married Eliza, a gentle, fashionable girl, with a kind of indolence in
her temper, which might be termed negative good-nature: her virtues,
indeed, were all of that stamp. She carefully attended to the _shews_ of
things, and her opinions, I should have said prejudices, were such as
the generality approved of. She was educated with the expectation of a
large fortune, of course became a mere machine: the homage of her
attendants made a great part of her puerile amusements, and she never
imagined there were any relative duties for her to fulfil: notions of
her own consequence, by these means, were interwoven in her mind, and
the years of youth spent in acquiring a few superficial accomplishments,
without having any taste for them. When she was first introduced into
the polite circle, she danced with an officer, whom she faintly wished
to be united to; but her father soon after recommending another in a
more distinguished rank of life, she readily submitted to his will, and
promised to love, honour, and obey, (a vicious fool,) as in duty bound.
While they resided in London, they lived in the usual fashionable style,
and seldom saw each other; nor were they much more sociable when they
wooed rural felicity for more than half the year, in a delightful
country, where Nature, with lavish hand, had scattered beauties around;
for the master, with brute, unconscious gaze, passed them by unobserved,
and sought amusement in country sports. He hunted in the morning, and
after eating an immoderate dinner, generally fell asleep: this
seasonable rest enabled him to digest the cumbrous load; he would then
visit some of his pretty tenants; and when he compared their ruddy glow
of health with his wife's countenance, which even rouge could not
enliven, it is not necessary to say which a _gourmand_ would give the
preference to. Their vulgar dance of spirits were infinitely more
agreeable to his fancy than her sickly, die-away languor. Her voice was
but the shadow of a sound, and she had, to complete her delicacy, so
relaxed her nerves, that she became a mere nothing.
Many such noughts are there in the female world! yet she had a good
opinion of her own merit,--truly, she said long prayers,--and sometimes
read her Week's Preparation: she dreaded that horrid place vulgarly
called _hell_, the regions below; but whether her's was a mounting
spirit, I cannot pretend to determine; or what sort of a planet would
have been proper for her, when she left her _material_ part in this
world, let metaphysicians settle; I have nothing to say to her unclothed
spirit.
As she was sometimes obliged to be alone, or only with her French
waiting-maid, she sent to the metropolis for all the new publications,
and while she was dressing her hair, and she could turn her eyes from
the glass, she ran over those most delightful substitutes for bodily
dissipation, novels. I say bodily, or the animal soul, for a rational
one can find no employment in polite circles. The glare of lights, the
studied inelegancies of dress, and the compliments offered up at the
shrine of false beauty, are all equally addressed to the senses.
When she could not any longer indulge the caprices of fancy one way, she
tried another. The Platonic Marriage, Eliza Warwick, and some other
interesting tales were perused with eagerness. Nothing could be more
natural than the developement of the passions, nor more striking than
the views of the human heart. What delicate struggles! and uncommonly
pretty turns of thought! The picture that was found on a bramble-bush,
the new sensitive-plant, or tree, which caught the swain by the
upper-garment, and presented to his ravished eyes a portrait.--Fatal
image!--It planted a thorn in a till then insensible heart, and sent a
new kind of a knight-errant into the world. But even this was nothing to
the catastrophe, and the circumstance on which it hung, the hornet
settling on the sleeping lover's face. What a _heart-rending_ accident!
She planted, in imitation of those susceptible souls, a rose bush; but
there was not a lover to weep in concert with her, when she watered it
with her tears.--Alas! Alas!
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