"Female youth, left to weak woman's care" are "Strangers to reason and reflection made, / Left to their passions, and by them betrayed; / Untaught the noble end of glorious truth, / Bred to deceive even from earliest youth; / Unused to books, nor virtue taught to prize; / Whose mind, a savage waste, unpeopled lies; / Which to supply, trifles fill up the void, / And idly busy, to no end employed."
An Epistle to Mr. Pope. Occasioned by his Characters of Women
Lonsdale, R. Ed. <u>Eighteenth Century Women Poets</u>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.