Can you be revived in a time so little suited to you?

A Chinese, who lived some time in England, has acknowledged that, during the first part of his residence in London, he had much difficulty to refrain from assaulting every woman with whom he found himself alone.

Our ancestors, whose principles were founded on reason and experience, left to their wives a liberty which was only restricted by the most salutary prejudice, and by a regard for their reputation; a restraint much stronger than all the subjection and all the chains, which their address so well knew how to turn to their advantage. Iron gratings were only known for the infancy of beauty, to preserve inexperience from the dangers which surrounded it; and, perhaps, the convents were, in this respect, the wisest institutions for young persons.

One cannot avoid regretting the demolition of these sacred retreats, where

virtue rested in

peace, where

young

fe

males were preserved from snares, and their education promoted. If, in the interior of these convents, there existed abuses, could they not have been reformed without annihilating these respectable asylums? Where can a young widower, destitute of parents, now place his daughter, after his wife has been taken from him? Frequently his illness, his avocations, the necessity of separating, of tearing himself from those scenes which perpetuate his tears, may force him to a long absence :-Can he take with him in his excursions a young female, whose age and beauty design her for retirement until the time of her marriage? I would, certainly, wish to do justice to some other institutions, which have been established with a view of supplying the loss sustained in these convents; but they will not be able, with all the care of the teachers, to supply but in part, those revered habitations, to which the solemnity of re

ligion gave an imposing character, and which the public esteem rendered worthy of receiving timid innocence and distressed virtue.

CHIVALRY.

WHILST the gallantry of the north was making great progress in Europe, the slavery of women extended itself in Asia by the conquests of the Arabs.

Let us now quit Asia, leave its women without hope, and resigning themselves to their fate; and let us come to that period when their destiny presented a picture more attractive, by the establishment of chivalry among our

ancestors.

If the Turks, disgusted with their former worship, and having no fixed notions on politics and religion, easily adopted the laws of Mahomet, we must admit that this instability of prin

ciple was as general in these times. The human race seemed everywhere plunged into a state of uncertainty and imbecility in Europe, there existed in the minds of men an admixture of amorous, religious, and military ideas, which led them at the same time to undertakings the most opposite. A lover, by the same sentiment as bound him to his mistress, thought himself obliged to murder any one who should think of casting at her a single glance. The pilgrims, likewise, pillaged and destroyed in their travels, and arrived at Jerusalem laden with crimes; so much the more numerous in proportion as they felt a certainty of obtaining pardon. No asylum was sacred, no property secure; the right of the most powerful was everywhere exercised; and the women were more persecuted than courted. Nevertheless some ideas of reason and of justice were discoverable even in the midst of these disorders.

One is tired of a cruel anarchy where

each seizes all or has nothing. This internal struggle of the desire of peace and order against licentiousness and a state of habitual warfare, resembles the dreadful convulsions of nature, which, tired of chaos and the dissonance of the elements, wished to separate them, and put each in its proper place.

Some indolent and martial nobles thought of associating together, to supply the weakness of the laws by the force of arms. Their design was, at first, only to protect the timid and the innocent, to combat the Moors in Spain, the Saracens in the East, the tyrants of the castles in Germany, and to secure, in France, the quiet of travellers. Such, according to several historians, was the noble institution of chivalry. I am far from contradicting this assertion; but all the splendour of this chivalric system had yet another cause, as I have observed above.

If we trace, with any degree of care, the progress of the female mind at this