[p80] FEMALE DELICACY.

Where the human race has little other culture than what it receives from nature, the two sexes live together, unconscious of almost any restraint on their words or on their actions. The Greeks, in the heroic ages, as appears from the whole history of their conduct, were totally unacquainted with delicacy. The Romans in the infancy of their empire, were the same. Tacitus informs us that the ancient Germans had not separate beds for the two sexes, but that they lay promiscuously on reeds or on heath, spread along the walls of their houses. This custom still prevails in Lapland, among the peasants of Norway, Poland, and Russia; and it is not altogether obliterated in some parts of the highlands of Scotland and Wales.

In Otaheite, to appear naked or in clothes, are circumstances equally indifferent to both sexes; nor does any word in their language, nor any action to which they are prompted by nature, seem more indelicate or reprehensible than another. Such are the effects of a total want of culture.

Effects not very dissimilar, are, in France and Italy, produced from a redundance of it. Though those are the polite countries in Europe, women there set themselves above shame, and despise delicacy. It is laughed out of existence, as a silly and unfashionable weakness.

But in China, one of the politest countries in Asia, and perhaps not even, in this respect, [p81] behind France, or Italy, the case is quite otherwise. No human being can be more delicate than a Chinese woman in her dress, in her behavior, and in her conversation; and should she ever happen to be exposed in any unbecoming manner, she feels with the greatest poignancy the awkwardness of her situation, and if possible, covers her face, that she may not be known.

In the midst of so many discordant appearances, the mind is perplexed, and can hardly fix upon any cause to which female delicacy is to be ascribed. If we attend, however, to the whole animal creation, if we consider it attentively wherever it falls under our observation, it will discover to us, that in the female there is a greater degree of delicacy or coy reserve than in the male. Is not this a proof, that, through the wide extent of creation, the seeds of delicacy are more liberally bestowed upon females than upon males?

In the remotest periods of which we have any historical account, we find that the women had a delicacy to which the other sex were strangers. Rebecca veiled herself when she first approached Isaac, her future husband. Many of the fables of antiquity mark, with the most distinguishing characters, the force of female delicacy. Of this kind is the fable of Actæon and Diana. Actæon, a famous hunter, being in the woods with his hounds, beating for game, accidentally spied Diana and her nymphs bathing in a river. Prompted by curiosity, he stole silently into a neighboring thicket, that he [p82] might have a nearer view of them. The goddess discovering him, was so affronted at his audacity, and so much ashamed to have been seen naked, that in revenge she immediately transformed him into a stag, set his own hounds upon him, and encouraged them to overtake and devour him. Besides this, and other fables, and historical anecdotes of antiquity, their poets seldom exhibit a female character without adorning it with the graces of modesty and delicacy. Hence we may infer, that these qualities have not been only essential to virtuous women in civilized countries, but were also constantly praised and esteemed by men of sensibility; and that delicacy is an innate principle in the female mind.

There are so many evils attending the loss of virtue in women, and so greatly are the minds of that sex depraved when they have deviated from the path of rectitude, that a general contamination of their morals may be considered as one of the greatest misfortunes that can befal a state, as in time it destroys almost every public virtue of the men. Hence all wise legislators have strictly enforced upon the sex a particular purity of manners; and not satisfied that they should abstain from vice only, have required them even to shun every appearance of it.

Such, in some periods, were the laws of the Romans; and such were the effects of these laws, that if ever female delicacy shone forth in a conspicuous manner, it was perhaps among those people, after they had worn off much of [p83] the barbarity of their first ages, and before they became contaminated, by the wealth and manners of the nations which they plundered and subjected. Then it was that we find many of their women surpassing in modesty almost every thing related by fable; and then it was that their ideas of delicacy were so highly refined, that they could not even bear the secret consciousness of an involuntary crime, and far less of having tacitly consented to it.