very dry task, and disquisitions addressed to the understanding,
intolerably tedious, and almost unintelligible? Thus are they
necessarily dependent on the novelist for amusement. Yet, when I
exclaim against novels, I mean when contrasted with those works
which exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination. For
any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a
blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement, and
obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking
powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to
the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross
gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade
of delicacy.

This observation is the result of experience; for I have known
several notable women, and one in particular, who was a very good
woman--as good as such a narrow mind would allow her to be, who
took care that her daughters (three in number) should never see a
novel. As she was a woman of fortune and fashion, they had various
masters to attend them, and a sort of menial governess to watch
their footsteps. From their masters they learned how tables,
chairs, etc. were called in French and Italian; but as the few
books thrown in their way were far above their capacities, or
devotional, they neither acquired ideas nor sentiments, and passed
their time, when not compelled to repeat WORDS, in dressing,
quarrelling with each other, or conversing with their maids by
stealth, till they were brought into company as marriageable.

Their mother, a widow, was busy in the mean time in keeping up her
connexions, as she termed a numerous acquaintance lest her girls
should want a proper introduction into the great world. And these