280 Education. 



society. Female education has been more an object 

 of attention, and been conducted upon more liberal 

 principles within the last thirty years, in every cul- 

 tivated part of Europe, and in America, than at 

 any former period. Some of the ablest pens have 

 been employed in prescribing plans for the culti- 

 vation of their minds; seminaries of learning, par- 

 ticularly adapted to their advantage, have been in- 

 stituted; women have, of course, become, in gene- 

 ral, better informed; the sex has furnished more 

 instances of learning and talents than ever before; 

 a female of elevated understanding, and of respect- 

 able literary acquirements, is no longer a wonder- 

 ful phenomenon. Corresponding to the increase 

 of cultivation bestowed upon them, they have risen 

 higher in the scale of intellect, and evinced a capa- 

 city to vie with the other sex in literature, as well as 

 moral excellence. In a word, at the close of the 

 eighteenth century it had become as rare and dis- 

 graceful for a woman to be ignorant, within certain 

 limits, as at the commencement of it such igno- 

 rance was common. 



As there is no truth more generally admitted, 

 than that every step in the progress of civilization 

 brings new honour to the female sex, and increases 

 their importance in society; so there is, perhaps, 

 no fact which better establishes the claim of the 

 eighteenth century to much progress in knowledge 

 and refinement, than the improvements in female 

 education to which it has given rise. It is a pro- 

 minent feature in the age, and forms one of its sig- 

 nal honours, that its close found the female sex, 

 through a great part of the civilized world, more 

 generally imbued with the elements of literature 

 and science, than they ever before possessed since 

 the creation. 



The learning of the female world, in the period 

 under review, may be considered as bearing some 



