An Old Description of Modern Belles.
The following is an extract from a letter written by the poet, Burns, to a young lady of his time. If the description he gives of fashionable young females was true in his day, what shall be said of its application to that portion of the human race at the present time? The crowd of “Nothings” has not diminished, and there is ample room for the “Somethings” to assert their existence. May the ranks of that useful class be rapidly recruited. Now let me add a few wishes which every man, who has himself the honor of being a father, must breathe when he sees female youth, beauty, innocence, about to enter into this much-chequered and precarious world. May you, my young madam, escape that frivolity, which threatens universally to pervade the minds and manners of fashionable life. To pass by the rougher and still more degenerate sex; the mob of fashionable female youth, what are they? Are they anything? They prattle, laugh, sing, dance, finger a lesson, or perhaps turn over the pages of a fashionable novel; but are their minds stored with any information worthy of the noble powers of reason and judgment? or do their hearts glow with sentiment, ardent, generous, and humane? Were I to poetize on the subject, I would call them the butterflies of the humankind; remarkable only for, and distinguished only by, the idle variety of their gaudy glare; sillily straying from one blossoming weed to another, without a meaning, and without an aim; the idiot prey of every pirate of the skies, who thinks them worth his while as he wings his way by them; and speedily by wintry time swept to that oblivion whence they might as well never had appeared. Amid this crowd of nothings, may you, madam, be something! May you be a character, dignified as a rational and immortal being!