We train them up from their infancy to the traffic of love; their grace, dressing, knowledge, language, and whole instruction tend that way:  their governesses imprint nothing in them but the idea of love, if for nothing else but by continually representing it to them, to give them a distaste for it.  My daughter, the only child I have, is now of an age that forward young women are allowed to be married at; she is of a slow, thin, and tender complexion, and has accordingly been brought up by her mother after a retired and particular manner, so that she but now begins to be weaned from her childish simplicity.  She was reading before me in a French book where the word ‘fouteau’, the name of a tree very well known, occurred;—­[The beech-tree; the name resembles in sound an obscene French word.]—­the woman, to whose conduct she is committed, stopped her short a little roughly, and made her skip over that dangerous step.  I let her alone, not to trouble their rules, for I never concern myself in that sort of government; feminine polity has a mysterious procedure; we must leave it to them; but if I am not mistaken the commerce of twenty lacquies could not, in six months’ time, have so imprinted in her memory the meaning, usage, and all the consequence of the sound of these wicked syllables, as this good old woman did by reprimand and interdiction.

                   “Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos
                    Matura virgo, et frangitur artibus;
                    Jam nunc et incestos amores
                    De tenero, meditatur ungui.”

["The maid ripe for marriage delights to learn Ionic dances, and to imitate those lascivious movements.  Nay, already from her infancy she meditates criminal amours.”—­Horace, Od., iii. 6, 21., the text has ’fingitur’.]

Let them but give themselves the rein a little, let them but enter into liberty of discourse, we are but children to them in this science.  Hear them but describe our pursuits and conversation, they will very well make you understand that we bring them nothing they have not known before, and digested without our help.

[This sentence refers to a conversation between some young women in his immediate neighbourhood, which the Essayist just below informs us that he overheard, and which was too shocking for him to repeat.  It must have been tolerably bad.—­Remark by the editor of a later edition.]

Is it, perhaps, as Plato says, that they have formerly been debauched young fellows?  I happened one day to be in a place where I could hear some of their talk without suspicion; I am sorry I cannot repeat it.  By’rlady, said I, we had need go study the phrases of Amadis, and the tales of Boccaccio and Aretin, to be able to discourse with them:  we employ our time to much purpose indeed.  There is neither word, example, nor step they are not more perfect in than our books; ’tis a discipline that springs with their blood,