DEPARTMENT OF MAGAZINE MIMICRY |
| DIRECTOR Doris Thistle |
ABOUT
A propensity to imitation is natural to the human mind, and is attended with various effects highly favourable to human happiness. To childhood it is a perpetual source of knowledge, gained without labour and without reluctance. In riper years it continues to instruct. It produces such a degree of conformity between the manners and conduct of different individuals, as maintains the harmony of society, notwithstanding the clashing pursuits and pretension? which agitate the world. It contributes, in subordination to higher principles, to conciliate those, who have experienced a sudden ele\ation or depression of fortune, to the habits of their new condition, and to open their ejes to its comforts. This propensity shews itself with especial strength in the female sex. Providence, designing from the beginning that the manner of life to be adopted by women should in many respects ultimately .timately depend, not so much on their own deliberate choice, as on the determination, or at least on the interest and convenience, of the parent, of the husband, or of some other near connection ; has implanted in them a remarkable tendency to conform to the wishes and example of those for whom they feel a .warmth of regard,^ and even of all those with whom they are in familiar habits of intercourse. In youth, when the feelings of the heart are the most lively, and established modes of proceeding are not yet formed, this principle is far more powerful than in the more advanced periods of life. As the mind, in obeying the impulse of this principle, no less than in following any other of its native or acquired tendencies, is capable of bfing ensnared into errors and excesses ; the season of youth, the season when the principle itself is in its greatest strength, and when it has yet derived few lessons from reflection and experience, is the time when error and excess are most to be - apprehended.