Volume 1

Hygeia : or Essays moral and medical : on the causes affecting the personal state of our middling and affluent classes / by Thomas Beddoes, M.D.

  • Beddoes, Thomas, 1760-1808.
Date:
1802-1803
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hygeia : or Essays moral and medical : on the causes affecting the personal state of our middling and affluent classes / by Thomas Beddoes, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    what they decry : and manage their ridicule so, as to recommend existing abuses, not less baneful than any crudely concerted plans for innovation.—It does not belong to the pre- sent plan to pursue these ideas further. I shall only add that parents, to whom the health of their families is dear, should be less severe against pining love-st'ories than, against tales, in which fashionable frivolity is directly or indirectly represented as amiable or respectable. Such tales, besides their other mischiefs, are to all intents and purposes codes of slow suicide.—Of modern narratives, I consider Sandford and Merton as the one, conceived in the most salutary spirit. Authors, whom we see darting thicr literary shears at every shoot of generous ardour in youthful minds, are almost certain to impair the vigour of the plant, and may clip it to death. Independently of novels, too exclusive .addiction to the belles lettres must hurt the weaker sex, as at present constituted.— A couplet, eternally quoted from Ovid, re- commends the ingenuous arts, as softeners of ferocious mariners. The prescription is excellent ; and for that very reason, unfit for the opposite case. That must be a