age.--Bless me, Caroline, if you are so prudent at eighteen, what will
you be at thirty? Beware!--and in the mean time you will never be a
heroine--what a stupid uninteresting heroine you will make! You will never
get into any _entanglements_, never have any adventures; or if kind fate
should, propitious to my prayer, bring you into some charming difficulties,
even then we could not tremble for you, or enjoy all the luxury of pity,
because we should always know that you would be so well able to extricate
yourself--so certain to conquer, or--not die--but endure.--Recollect that
Doctor Johnson, when his learned sock was off, confessed that he could
never be thoroughly interested for Clarissa, because he knew that her
prudence would always be equal to every occasion."

Mrs. Percy began to question whether Johnson had ever expressed this
sentiment seriously: she reprobated the cruelty of _friendly_ biographers,
who publish every light expression that escapes from celebrated lips in
private conversation; she was going to have added a word or two about the
injury done to the public, to young people especially, by the spreading
such rash dogmas under the sanction of a great name.

But Rosamond did not give her mother time to enforce this moral; she went
on rapidly with her own thoughts.

"Caroline, my dear," continued she, "you shall not be my heroine; you are
too well proportioned for a heroine--in mind, I mean: a heroine may--_must_
have a finely-proportioned person, but never a well-proportioned mind.
All her virtues must be larger than the life; all her passions those of
a tragedy queen. Produce--only dare to produce--one of your reasonable
wives, mothers, daughters, or sisters on the theatre, and you would see
them hissed off the stage. Good people are acknowledged to be the bane
of the drama and the novel--I never wish to see a reasonable woman on