"True courage, rightly understood, and properly cultivated, will inspire the fair sex with the noblest sentiments of honour and generosity. It will elevate their minds above those mean and paltry methods, which too many of them put in practice, to captivate the hearts of the giddy and unthinking. It will raise in them a noble and emulative zeal for literary studies, which will rescue them from the odium that is too frequently, and too justly, cast on many of them, of being pretty, but silly, prattling creatures. It is true courage only that can raise in them such sentiments as shall preserve them the esteem and affection of all, when the bloom of youth shall be lost in the evening of life; when the lily and rose shall fade on their cheek, and the beautiful form of their persons can be no longer admired.
"I have now, young ladies, given you my opinion of what really ought to be considered as _true courage_ in your sex, and I hope it will have some influence on your minds, as well as on your conduct in the commerce of this busy world. It is not at all surprising, that you young ladies should differ in your opinions on so delicate a question, since _true courage_ is, in these times of refinement, considered in a very different light to what it was in the remote ages of antiquity. In order to amuse you, and perhaps instruct you, I shall beg your attention to a piece of ancient history; from which you will judge what was the barbarous ideas the ladies of antiquity had of true courage.
"Mithridates, king of Pontus, proving unsuccessful in the war in which he was engaged against Lucullus, a Roman general, had shut up two of his wives (for the custom of that country allowed of a plurality) and two of his sisters, whom he most loved, in that part of his kingdom which was the most remote from danger. At last, not being able to brook the apprehensions of their falling into the hands of the Romans, he sent orders to Bacchalides, a eunuch, to put them to death. The manner in which they received this order, strongly marks the ideas the ladies of those times and regions had of true courage.
"Berenice and Monimes were these unfortunate princesses. The first was born in the island of Chio, and the other in Miletus, a city of Ionia, towards the borders of Cairo, on the coast of the Ægean Sea. Monimes was celebrated for the invincible resistance which she made to all the offers of Mithridates, who was most violently in love with her, and to which she never consented, till he had declared her queen, by calling her his wife, and sending her the royal diadem--a ceremony indispensable in the marriage of kings in that part of the world.