Coquets

Weekly Visitor, or Ladies’ Miscellany 2.90 ( Jun 23, 1804): 300

The snares which a young man has to dread from Coquets are innumerable, and I advise my readers to flee that class of females like the plague. These reprobates are uncommon adepts in the dart of dissimulation, of lying with the greatest impudence, and affecting the most amiable sentiments to gratify their vanity, sensuality, vengeance or any other passion. It is extremely difficult to discover whether a Coquet loves you really on your own account. Even the most unequivocal instances of disinterestedness are no certain proofs that an abandoned woman loves you sincerely. She rejects, perhaps, your silver, to obtain the easier possession of yourself and your gold; or her temper renders her more eager to gratify her sensuality, than to satisfy her thirst for lucre. –Should she have resisted many temptations to impose upon you with safety; displayed a tender care for your fame and honor; should she not only never attempt prevailing upon you to break off other more natural and honorable connections, but readily sacrifice to you beauty, youth, gain, splendor and vanity; this would prove nothing else but, that even a Coquet, at times, may possess some good and amiable qualities; and prudence would nevertheless demand you to be on your guard, and not to trust her too implicitly. A woman who disregards chastity and modesty, the first and most sacred of all female virtues, cannot possibly have any regard for more delicate duties. I do not, however, mean to degrade all unhappy, fallen, and seduced females, to the contemptible class of Coquets and Prostitutes. True love can frequently call an erring heart to virtue. It has often been maintained, that a woman, who knows the danger from experience, is more difficult to be seduced than another who has never been led into temptation. However this kind of deviation renders sincere amendment at all times very precarious: and no situation is more humiliating and distressing for a sensible man, than to see the person dear to his heart despised by others, and to have reason to blush at the bonds which are sacred to him, and constitute the happiness of his life! As for the rest, pure and virtuous love is the best guardian of our innocence; and the conversation with chaste and accomplished women purifies the juvenile sense for virtue, and arms the heart of a young man against all studied and lustful artifices of seducing females.