The most distinguished female excellencies in England are an attachment to domestic life, an attention to its oeconomies, and a cultivated understanding.  Here, any thing like house-wifery is not expected but from the lower classes, and reading or information is confined chiefly to professed wits.  Yet the qualities so much esteemed in England are not the effect of education:  few domestic accomplishments, and little useful knowledge, are acquired at a boarding-school; but finally the national character asserts its empire, and the female who has gone through a course of frivolities from six to sixteen, who has been taught that the first “human principle” should be to give an elegant tournure to her person, after a few years’ dissipation, becomes a good wife and mother, and a rational companion.

In France, young women are kept in great seclusion:  religion and oeconomy form a principal part of conventual acquirements, and the natural vanity of the sex is left to develope itself without the aid of authority, or instillation by precept—­yet, when released from this sober tuition, manners take the ascendant here as in England, and a woman commences at her marriage the aera of coquetry, idleness, freedom, and rouge.—­We may therefore, I think, venture to conclude, that the education of a boarding-school is better calculated for the rich, that of a convent for the middle classes and the poor; and, consequently, that the suppression of this last in France will principally affect those to whom it was most beneficial, and to whom the want of it will be most dangerous.

A committee of wise men are now forming a plan of public instruction, which is to excel every thing ever adopted in any age or country; and we may therefore hope that the defects which have hitherto prevailed, both in theirs and our own, will be remedied.  All we have to apprehend is, that, amidst so many wise heads, more than one wise plan may be produced, and a difficulty of choice keep the rising generation in a sort of abeyance, so that they must remain sterile, or may become vitiated, while it is determining in what manner they shall be cultivated.

It is almost a phrase to say, the resources of France are wonderful, and this is no less true than generally admitted.  Whatever be the want or loss, it is no sooner known than supplied, and the imagination of the legislature seems to become fertile in proportion to the exigence of the moment.—­I was in some pain at the disgrace of Mirabeau, lest this new kind of retrospective judgement should depopulate the Pantheon of the few divinities that remained; more especially when I considered that Voltaire, notwithstanding his merits as an enemy to revelation, had been already accused of aristocracy, and even Rousseau himself might not be found impeccable.  His Contrat Social might not, perhaps, in the eyes of a committee of philosophical Rhadmanthus’s, atone for his occasional admiration of christianity:  and thus some crime, either of church or state, disfranchise the whole race of immortals, and their fame scarcely outlast the dispute about their earthly remains.*