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Updated: May 25, 2025
I have indeed told her that if she kept her honour, and behaved herself in such a manner as became the Bickerstaffs, I would get her an agreeable man for her husband; which was a promise I made her after reading a passage in Pliny's "Epistles." That polite author had been employed to find out a consort for his friend's daughter, and gives the following character of the man he had pitched upon.
Isaac Bickerstaffs "portraits" of Chloe and Clarissa, or the "lucubration" on Deference to Public Opinion. When La Bruyère died, Steele was already an author, and what is more, a moralist. It is impossible not to believe that he had been reading the "Caractères" when it occurred to him that he might procure himself "a most exquisite pleasure," by framing "Characters of Domestic Life."
I am sorry to own it; but there is one branch of the house of the Bickerstaffs who have been as erroneous in their conduct this way as any other family whatsoever. The head of this branch is now in town, and has brought up with him his son and daughter, who are all the children he has, in order to be put some way into the world, and see fashions.
As the human race, however, could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable that an attention to breed should ever become general; indeed, I know of no well-directed attempts of this kind, except in the ancient family of the Bickerstaffs, who are said to have been very successful in whitening the skins and increasing the height of their race by prudent marriages, particularly by that very judicious cross with Maud, the milk-maid, by which some capital defects in the constitutions of the family were corrected.
But while our ancestors were thus taken up in cultivating the eyes and nose, the face of the Bickerstaffs fell down insensibly into chin, which was not taken notice of, their thoughts being so much employed upon the more noble features, till it became almost too long to be remedied.
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