Her
mind had fair play. Her father took it for granted that she could
learn what a boy of the same age could learn, and gave her precisely
the advantages which he would have given a son. Besides the usual
accomplishments, French, music, dancing, and riding, she learned to
read Virgil, Horace, Terence, Lucian, Homer, in the original. She
appears to have read all of Terence and Lucian, a great part of
Horace, all the Iliad, and large portions of the Odyssey. "Cursed
effects," exclaimed her father once,
"of fashionable education, of which both sexes are the
advocates, and yours eminently the victims. If I could
foresee that Theo would become a mere fashionable woman,
with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind,
adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would
earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence. But I yet
hope by her to convince the world what neither sex appears
to believe, that women have souls."
How faithfully, how skilfully he labored to kindle and nourish the
intelligence of his child his letters to her attest.
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