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N° 75. is much oftener of a base extraction, the child of vanity, and nursling of ignorance.

, December 4, 1750.


 * To the



HE diligence with which you endeavour to cultivate the knowledge of nature, manners, and life, will perhaps incline you to pay some regard to the observations of one who has been taught to know mankind by unwelcome information, and whose opinions are the result, not of solitary conjectures, but of practice and experience.

I was born to a large fortune, and bred to the knowledge of those arts which are supposed to accomplish the mind, and adorn the person, of a woman. To these attainments, which custom and education almost forced upon me, I added some voluntary acquisitions by the use of books and the conversation of that species of men whom the ladies generally mention with terror and aversion under the name of scholars, but whom I have found a harmless and inoffensive order of beings,