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"She said she foresaw that, if his heart was not steel and adamant, he would be ruined; that she had read his mind thoroughly, and plainly saw that the only vice he had in the world was want of deceit."

— Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)

Author

Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)

Work Title

The Younger Brother: a Novel

Place of Publication

London

Publisher

Printed for the Author

Date

1793

Metaphor

"She said she foresaw that, if his heart was not steel and adamant, he would be ruined; that she had read his mind thoroughly, and plainly saw that the only vice he had in the world was want of deceit."

Metaphor in Context

Emma warned him against the jays of France and the nightingales of Italy. She said she foresaw that, if his heart was not steel and adamant, he would be ruined; that she had read his mind thoroughly, and plainly saw that the only vice he had in the world was want of deceit. It was, to be sure, a strange declaration, but it was very true. That she should not wonder at any thing he became in the hands of the French and Italians; for he was such pliable wax that any man, with a plausible story, the argument of which could be deduced from a good motive, might shape him into any form. She begged of him, in particular, to beware of holy hypocrites. What she had read, she told him, of their cruelty and dissoluteness, was yet worse, if possible, than all the gambols with which the forms of their facetious religion seemed to burlesque its author: or rather, the author of that which they daringly ventured to innovate, and which involved a system of morality mild as mercy, and benignant as his holy name who established it. Above all she cautioned him against convents, and an intercourse with those drones of society the inmates of them, who, from leisure to plan, and inclination to execute, were the perpetrators of every species of profligacy and mischief. Her reading, she said, had induced her to believe that there were more than three hundred thousand cloystered clergy in France, and a proportionable number of females; that the wickedness, the attrocious wickedness carried on within those walls, which were supposed to immure saints, was shock to humanity. (II.xii, pp. 128-9)