We people of fortune, or such as are born to large expectations, of both

sexes, are generally educated wrong. You have occasionally touched upon

this, Pamela, several times in your journal, so justly, that I need say

the less to you. We are usually so headstrong, so violent in our wills,

that we very little bear control.

Humoured by our nurses, through the faults of our parents, we practise

first upon them; and shew the gratitude of our dispositions, in

an insolence that ought rather to be checked and restrained, than

encouraged. Next, we are to be indulged in every thing at school; and our masters

and mistresses are rewarded with further grateful instances of our

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boisterous behaviour. But, in our wise parents' eyes, all looks well, all is forgiven and

excused; and for no other reason, but because we are theirs.

Our next progression is, we exercise our spirits, when brought home,

to the torment and regret of our parents themselves, and torture their

hearts by our undutiful and perverse behaviour to them, which, however

ungrateful in us, is but the natural consequence of their culpable

indulgence to us, from infancy upwards.

And then, next, after we have, perhaps, half broken their hearts, a

wife is looked out for: convenience, or birth, or fortune, are the first

motives, affection the last (if it is at all consulted): and two people

thus educated, thus trained up, in a course of unnatural ingratitude,

and who have been headstrong torments to every one who has had a share

in their education, as well as to those to whom they owe their being,

are brought together; and what can be expected, but that they should

pursue, and carry on, the same comfortable conduct in matrimony, and

join most heartily to plague one another? And, in some measure, indeed,

this is right; because hereby they revenge the cause of all those who

have been aggrieved and insulted by them, upon one another.

The gentleman has never been controlled: the lady has never been

contradicted. He cannot bear it from one whose new relation, he thinks, should oblige

her to shew a quite contrary conduct. She thinks it very barbarous, now, for the first time, to be opposed

in her will, and that by a man from whom she expected nothing but

tenderness. So great is the difference between what they both expect from one

another, and what they both find in each other, that no wonder

misunderstandings happen; that these ripen to quarrels; that acts of

unkindness pass, which, even had the first motive to their union been

affection, as usually it is not, would have effaced all manner of tender

impressions on both sides.




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