with ignorance, with deceit, with hypocrisy, with unfeeling coldness, with meanness, with servility, and with cruelty, all blended and compounded together in one horrid mass. of iniquitous deformity, and flagitious diabolism, will render her own existence a continued catenation of anguish and of woe; and, what to a benevolent heart is the worst of all evils, will, for ever, preclude her from the exercise of the finer and the better feelings of affection, of kindness, and of philanthropy.

ESSAY CXXXVII.

ON DELICACY.

CHILDREN are very often made miserable by a petty species of indelicacy, which prevails among almost all coarse and ignorant people. I mean the practice of continually noting any fancied bodily defect or deformity; as if these barbarous and cruel observations, which agonize the feelings of the unprotected and much-suffering innocents, could remedy or reform the inconvenience, to which they perpetually allude. I know an old hag, who is incessantly mortifying and wounding her niece, an amiable and lovely, little girl, by bawling out, before all manner of people, "Lord! what long arms you have got, child; why nobody has got such long arms as your's!"

Does the antiquated Beldame imagine, that her continued yell of reiterated persecution will shorten the arms of her niece? The truth is, that the girl's arms are in exact proportion

to the rest of her limbs; but her horrible old aunt hath taken it into her head, that they are too long, and, having neither understanding nor virtue, neither tenderness nor feeling, she excruciates the heart of a child of exquisite sensibility and delicacy by her vulgar, and brutal exclamations.

This same female nuisance cannot espy a scratch on the face, or a pimple on the nose of a child, but she immediately cries out, "dear me! what a scratch you have gotten on your cheek, why you will never be fit to be seen again, child, you are so disfigured; and, then, that pimple on your nose; how shockingly it looks, every body will think that you have been drinking brandy; I would not have such a pimple on my nose; no, that I would not, not for any thing, I can assure you."

Pray, can greater coarseness and indelicacy than this be evinced by any of the fair sex at Billingsgate, or Broad St. Giles's? Surely, the child is well aware, that it has a scratch on it's cheek, and an excrescence on it's nose, and can very well dispense with any further information on the subject; because it knows, that, although it's feelings will be

cruelly hurt by being pointed out as an object of disgust, and a spectacle of deformity, yet, neither the wound on the cheek nor the pimple on the nose will be healed, or will vanish one moment the sooner, for all the noise and vulgarity of the whole gang of such obnoxious vermin. Why not suffer the pimple to depart, and the wound to heal in silence, without ringing a perpetual alarum to call people's attention to what they would not otherwise have observed, or if they had observed, would not have noticed, if they possessed the most faintly marked ray of humanity?

All discourse of this kind is very indelicate and very cruel; because it wounds the feelings of helpless and innocent human beings, without producing or attempting to produce any beneficial effect. We may be well assured, that no one wishes to be considered as an object of contempt or disgust; but the animadverting with signs of loathing and aversation upon any appearance, which a child cannot prevent or remove, must cause that child to imagine herself an unpleasant: animal in the sight of others.

I once heard a female, who fancies herself to be a gentlewoman, say to a girl, that had just come into the parlour, where about a dozen people were sitting, from a walk on a summer morning, in the month of June, "how hot you are; why you look as if you had been broiled!" This delicate little observavation did not render the poor girl cooler; indeed, her blushes, when the speech of the old harridan had turned the eyes of all the company upon her, evinced such keen and insufferable agony, that an old gentleman, who was present, was so much affected, that he was obliged to leave the room.

A lady of my acquaintance contrives to render the life of her two daughters completely wretched by this foolish and indelicate conduct. The eldest is inclined to be plump in her person; her sister is slender, and very gracefully formed. Their mother, who is a sad, noisy, fatiguing woman, is continually telling Mary, the eldest girl, that she is so very fat, as to be quite an object, more like a wool-sack, than a genteel young lady. Nancy, the youngest daughter has the superlative pleasure of daily and hourly hearing,