TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LOUISA, BARONESS ROLLE. MADAM, I CANNOT but feel a degree of pride and pleasure, in dedicating to your Ladyship a work, written with the hope of directing attention to the benefit, which has been effected in a long succession of ages through the influence and example of the Matrons of England. It would be presumptuous in me to enumerate all the munificent acts which particularly connect your Ladyship's name with the subject of the following pages; but having dwelt within the scene of your benevolence, and been an eye-witness of that zeal in supporting the institutions of our ancestors, which influenced all around you, I may be allowed to point to churches endowed and supported by the same bountiful hand, that provides for the spiritual welfare and temporal comfort of hundreds of the rising generation; thus strengthening that bond of union which in this favoured country, makes the orphan and friendless, children by adoption of the noble, the rich, and the powerful. My gratification in being permitted to place this volume under your protection, rests therefore upon higher grounds than the indulgence of those personal feelings which prompt me to acknowledge with gratitude my deep sense of the kind interest which your Ladyship has ever taken in my literary pursuits. I have the honour to remain, Madam, Your Ladyship's Obliged and obedient Servant, CAROLINE A. HALSTED. Newlan House, Lymington, 12th March, 1840. PREFACE. THE truth conveyed in the title of the present Essay has been long and universally felt; but though customary to acknowledge, in general terms, the Obligations of Literature to Maternal instruction, and Maternal influence, yet the fact has never perhaps been sufficiently proved, by examples. It would ill become the writer of so humble a work, to take any merit for discoveries, or to presume on having produced new matter for discussion. The design of the Essay must indeed be so manifest that it scarcely needs a preface; but, the subject of education, and the various modes of developing, at the most fitting period, the energies of the youthful mind, now occupy so much of public attention, that it has induced the author to adopt the present plan to shew the source, whence all permanent instruction must emanate. The term MOTHERS OF ENGLAND, comes home to the hearts of all. Who has not felt its endearing tie? Who has not yielded to its tenderness in infancy, and bowed to its power through life? Who has not pondered over those happy hours, when a Mother's precept was a law,―a Mother's reproof indisputable,a Mother's tear, nay, a Mother's sigh, the bitterest of earthly sorrow? And will the Matrons of England in the present day, when innovation of all that is sacred and dear to them is unblushingly advocated, when our ancient institutions, our holy Church, the domestic happiness of our country, are openly attacked, and insidiously menaced; —will the Mothers of England slight or disregard that power, peculiarly their own, which in the most unenlightened days tempered the passions and moulded the character of the English youth, and which in more civilized times has led to the proverbial superiority, and moral excellence of the daughters of Britain, and produced in her sons, some of the noblest characters the world has ever seen. Let it not be supposed that the term, "MOTHERS OF ENGLAND" means only Mothers of a single household. The women of England owe a debt of gratitude to their COUNTRY, in which their sovereignty in domestic life is willingly conceded, and which can only be repaid by rearing the children of the STATE in those several departments which are woman's allotted sphere. Gratifying indeed is it to see the infant thousands of our native land protected and |