We have pleasure in bearing our humble evidence in favour of the great pains, and cost, to which mothers now put themselves in educating their daughters; and it is incontrovertible, that the rising generation are about to come on the stage of active life, with many advantages of instruction which were not enjoyed by their parents. But, granting it to be true, that these interesting young ladies may have considerable advantages over their predecessors in the knowledge of French, geography, music, a little drawing, and a chaster fashion of dancing, still, we are apprehensive, that in more humble and useful domestic education not a little is wanting: and this important defect, we conceive, is not to be remedied by expensive teachers, or by the routine of boarding-schools; but, if we mistake not, by good example at home. To improve the domestic education in the female part of the community, it would be necessary to detach young ladies as much as possible from the customary attendance of old favourite “zambas;” who, there is much reason to believe, teach them at an early age to pry into the private weaknesses of their seniors, and excite in their quick, comprehensive minds a degree of attention and curiosity which, when indiscreetly called forth, seldom fail to bias their inclination to vices that may on some occasions be deemed hereditary; and thus open a door to a series of indulgences which, in the long-run, prove the bane of their own ill-sought happiness, as well as the wreck of many a fond parent’s hopes, too blindly placed on a daughter left to the daily tutorship of intriguing domestics.
The ladies when young, and long before they become marriageable, are taught to anticipate their own omnipotence at fifteen, which little girls of seven or eight years of age already reckon to be the approaching era of their perfect felicity; for the Spaniards say “No hay fea de quince,”—All are fair at fifteen. There is also among these gifted women, whose superiority, as a body, over their own countrymen is always admitted, a great “esprit de corps,” so that the greatest sinner among them is never left without a gentle voice to plead her cause, and palliate, when she cannot exculpate, a sister’s errors.