Alexandria Gazette & Advertiser

EXTRACTS FROM

"Bracebridge Hall, or the Humourists.
A Melody, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent."

Wives may gather hints from the following:

There is no great need of enforcing on an unmarried lady the necessity of being agreeable: nor is there any great art requisite in a youthful beauty to enable her to please.-- Nature has multiplied attraction round her --youth is in itself attractive. The freshness of budding beauty needs no foreign aid to set it off: it pleases merely because it is fresh. and budding, and beautiful. But it is for the married state that a woman needs the most instruction and in which she should be most on her guard to maintain her powers of pleasing. No woman can expect to be to her husband all that he fancied her, when he was a lover. Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the sex, as by their own imaginations.--They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals. A woman should therefore ascertain what was the charm that rendered her so fascinating when a girl, and endeavour to keep it up when she has become a wife. One great thing undoubtedly was the chariness of herself and her conduct, which an unmarried female always observes.

She should maintain the same niceness and reserve in her person and habits, and endeavor still to preserve a freshness and virgin delicacy in the eye of her husband. She should remember the province of woman is to be wooed. not to woo --to be caressed, not to caress. Man is an ungrateful being in love: bounty loses instead of winning him. The secret of a woman's power does not consist so much in giving, as in withholding--A woman may give up too much even to her husband. It is to a thousand little delicacies of conduct that she must trust to keep alive passion, and to protect herself from that dangerous familiarity, that thorough acquaintance with every weakness and imperfection incident to matrimony.-- By these means she may still maintain her power though she has surrendered her person: and may continue to romance of love, even beyond the honey moon.

"She that hath a wise husband,' says Jeremy Taylor, "must entice him to an eternal dearness by the veil of modesty. and the grave robes of chastity, the ornament of meekness, and the jewels of faith and charity. She must have no painting but blushings; her brightness must be purity, and she must shine round about sweetnesses and friendship, and she shall be pleasant while she lives, and desired when she dies."

I have wandered into a rambling series of remarks on a trite subject, and a dangerous one for a bachelor to meddle with. That I may not, however, appear to confine my observations entirely to the wife. I will conclude with another quotation from Jeremy Taylor. in which the duties of both parties are mentioned, while I would recommend his sermon on the marriage ring to all those who, wiser than myself are about entering the happy state of wedlock.

"There is scarce any matter of duty but it concerns them both alike, and is its variety by circumstances and little only distinguished by name, and hath accidents: and what in one is called love, in the other is called reverence : and what in the wife is obedience. the same in the man is duty. He provides, and she dispenses: he gives commandments, and she rules by them; he rules her by authority, and she rules him by love: she ought by all means to please him, and he must by no means displease her."