The Young Lady's Mentor / A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends

by Anonymous

AMUSEMENTS.

In addressing the following observations to you, I keep in mind the peculiarity of your position,—a position which has made you, while scarcely more than a child, independent of external control, and forced you into the responsibilities of deciding thus early on a course of conduct that may seriously affect your temporal and eternal interests. More happy are those placed under the authority of strict parents, who have already chosen and marked out for themselves a path to which they expect their children strictly to adhere. The difficulties that may still perplex the children of such parents are comparatively few: even if the strictness of the authority over them be inexpedient and over strained, it affords them a safeguard and a support for which they cannot be too grateful; it preserves them from the responsibility of acting for themselves at a time when their age and inexperience alike unfit them for a decision on any important practical point; it keeps them disengaged, as it were, from being pledged to any peculiar course of conduct until they have formed and matured their opinion as to the habits of social intercourse most expedient for them to adopt. Thus, when the time for independent action comes, they are quite free to pursue any new course of life without being shackled by former professions, or exposing themselves to the reproach (and consequent probable loss of influence) of having altered their former opinions and views.

Those, then, who are early guarded from any intercourse with the world ought, instead of murmuring at the unnecessary strictness of their seclusion, to reflect with gratitude on the advantages it affords them. Faith ought, even now, to teach them the lesson that experience is sure to impress on every thoughtful mind, that it is a special mercy to be preserved from the duties of responsibility until we are, comparatively speaking, fitted to enter upon them.

This is not, however, the case with you. Ignorant and inexperienced as you are, you must now select, from among all the modes of life placed within your reach, those which you consider the best suited to secure your welfare for time and for eternity. Your decision now, even in very trifling particulars, must have some effect upon your state in both existences. The most unimportant event of this life carries forward a pulsation into eternity, and acquires a solemn importance from the reaction. Every feeling which we indulge or act upon becomes a part of ourselves, and is a preparation, by our own hand, of a scourge or a blessing for us throughout countless ages.

It may seem a matter of comparative unimportance, of trifling influence over your future fate, whether you attend Lady A.'s ball to-night, or Lady H.'s to-morrow. You may argue to yourself that even those who now think balls entirely sinful have attended hundreds of them in their time, and have nevertheless become afterwards more religious and more useful than others who have never entered a ball-room. You might add, that there could be more positive sin in passing two or three hours with two or three people in Lady A's house in the morning than in passing the same number of hours with two or three hundred people in the same house in the evening. This is indeed true; but are you not deceiving yourself by referring to the mere overt act? That is, as you imply, past and over when the evening is past; but it is not so with the feelings which may make the ball either delightful or disagreeable to you; feelings, which may be then for the first time excited, never to be stilled again,—feelings which, when they once exist, will remain with you throughout eternity; for even if by the grace of God they are finally subdued, they will still remain with you in the memory of the painful conflicts, the severe discipline of inward and outward trials, required for their subjugation. Do not, however, suppose that I mean to attribute exclusive or universally injurious effects to the atmosphere of a ball-room. In the innocent smiles and unclouded brow of many a fair girl, the experienced eye truly reads their freedom from any taint of envy, malice, or coquetry; while, on the other hand, unmistakeable and unconcealed exhibitions of all these evil feelings may often be witnessed at a so-called "religious party."

This remark, however, is not to my purpose; it is only made par parenthèse, to obviate any pretence for mistaking my meaning, and for supposing that I attribute positive sin to that which I only object to as the possible, or rather the probable occasion of sin. I always think this latter distinction a very important one to attend to in discussing, in a more general point of view, the subject of amusements of every kind: it is, however, enough merely to notice it here, while we pass on to the question which I urge upon you to apply personally to yourself, namely, whether the ball-room be not a more favourable atmosphere for the first excitement and after-cultivation of many feminine failings than the quieter and more confined scenes of other social intercourse.

It is by tracing the effect produced on our own mind that we can alone form a safe estimate of the expediency of doubtful occupations. This is the primary point of view in which to consider the subject, though by no means the only one; for every Christian ought to exhibit a readiness in his own small sphere to emulate the unselfishness of the great apostle: "If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend."[89] The fear of the awful threatenings against those who "offend," i.e. lead into sin, any of "God's little ones,"[90] should combine with love for those for whom the Saviour died, to induce us freely to sacrifice things which would be personally harmless, on the ground of their being injurious to others.

This part of the subject is, however, of less importance for our present consideration, as from your youth and inexperience your example cannot yet exercise much influence on those around you.

Let us therefore return to the more personal part of the subject, namely, the effect produced on your own mind. I have spoken of feminine "failings:" I should, however, be inclined to apply a stronger term to the first that I am about to notice—the love of admiration, considering how closely it must ever be connected with the fatal vice of envy. She who has an earnest craving for general admiration for herself, is exposed to a strong temptation to regret the bestowal of any admiration on another. She has an instinctive exactness in her account of receipt and expenditure; she calculates almost unconsciously that the time and attention and interest excited by the attractive powers of others is so much homage subtracted from her own. That beautiful aphorism, "The human heart is like heaven—the more angels the more room for them," is to such persons as unintelligible in its loving spirit as in its wonderful philosophic truth. Their craving is insatiable, once it has become habitual, and their appetite is increased and stimulated, instead of being appeased, by the anxiously-sought-for nourishment.

These observations can only strictly apply to the fatal desire for general admiration. As long as the approbation only of the wise and good is our object, it is not so much that there are fewer opportunities of exciting the feeling of envy at this approbation being granted to others; there is, further, an instinctive feeling of its incompatibility with the very object we are aiming at. The case is altogether different when we seek to attract those whose admiration may be won by qualities quite different from any connected with moral excellence. There is here no restraint on our evil feelings: and when we cannot equal the accomplishments, the beauty, and the graces of another, we may possibly be tempted to envy, and, still further, to depreciate, those of the hated rival—perhaps, worse than all, may be tempted to seek to attract attention by means less simple and less obvious. If the receiving of admiration be injurious to the mind, what must the seeking for it be! "The flirt of many seasons" loses all mental perceptions of refinement by long practice in hardihood, as the hackneyed practitioner unconsciously deepens the rouge upon her cheek, until, unperceived by her blunted visual organs, it loses all appearance of truth and beauty. Some instances of the kind I allude to nave come before even your inexperienced eyes; and from the shrinking surprise with which you now contemplate them, I have no doubt that you would wish to shun even the first step in the same career. Indeed, it is probable that you, under any circumstances, would never go so far in coquetry as those to whom your memory readily recurs. Your innate delicacy, your feminine high-mindedness may, at any future time, as well as at present, preserve you from the bad taste of challenging those attentions which your very vanity would reject as worthless if they were not voluntarily offered.

Nevertheless, even in you, habits of dissipation may produce an effect which to your inmost being may be almost equally injurious. You may possess an antidote to prevent any external manifestations of the poisonous effects of an indulged craving for excitement; but general admiration, however spontaneously offered and modestly received, has nevertheless a tendency to create a necessity for mental stimulants. This, among other ill-effects, will, worst of all, incapacitate you from the appreciative enjoyment of healthy food.

The heart that with its luscious cates
The world has fed so long,
Could never taste the simple food
That gives fresh virtue to the good,
Fresh vigour to the strong.[91]

The pure and innocent pleasures which the hand of Providence diffuses plentifully around us will, too probably, become tasteless and insipid to one whose habits of excitement have destroyed the fresh and simple tastes of her mind. Stronger doses, as in the case of the opium-eater, will each day be required to produce an exhilarating effect, without which there is now no enjoyment, without which, in course of time, there will not be even freedom from suffering.

There is an analogy throughout between the mental and the physical intoxication; and it continues most strikingly, even when we consider both in their most favourable points of view, by supposing the victim to self-indulgence at last willing to retrace her steps. This fearful advantage is granted to our spiritual enemy by wilful indulgence in sin; that it is only when trying to adopt or resume a life of sobriety and self-denial that we become exposed to the severest temporal punishments of self-indulgence. As long as a course of this self-indulgence is continued, if external things should prosper with us, comparative peace and happiness may be enjoyed—(if indeed the loftier pleasures of devotion to God, self-control, and active usefulness can be forgotten,—supposing them to have been once experienced.) It is only when the grace of repentance is granted that the returning child of God becomes at the same time alive to the sinfulness of those pleasures which she has cultivated the habit of enjoying, and to the mournful fact of having lost all taste for those simple pleasures which are the only safe ones, because they alone leave the mind free for the exercise of devotion, and the affections warm and fresh for the contemplation of "the things that belong to our peace."

Sad and dreary is the path the penitent worldling has to traverse; often, despairing at the difficulties her former habits have brought upon her, she looks back, longingly and lingeringly, upon the broad and easy path she has lately left. Alas! how many of those thus tempted to "look back" have turned away entirely, and never more set their faces Zion-ward.

From the dangers and sorrows just described you have still the power of preserving yourself. You have as yet acquired no factitious tastes; you still retain the power of enjoying the simple pleasures of innocent childhood. It now depends upon your manner of spending the intervening years, whether, in the trying period of middle-age, simple and natural pleasures will still awaken emotions of joyousness and thankfulness in your heart.

I have spoken of thankfulness,—for one of the best tests of the innocence and safety of our pleasures is, the being able to thank God for them. While we thus look upon them as coming to us from his hand, we may safely bask in the sunshine of even earthly pleasures:—

The colouring may be of this earth,
The lustre comes of heavenly birth.[92]

Can you feel this with respect to the emotions of pleasurable excitement with which you left Lady M.'s ball? I am no fanatic, nor ascetic; and I can imagine it possible (though not probable) that among the visitors there some simple-minded and simple-hearted people, amused with the crowds, the dresses, the music, and the flowers, may have felt, even in this scene of feverish and dangerous excitement, something of "a child's pure delight in little things."[93] Without profaneness, and in all sincerity, they might have thanked God for the, to them, harmless recreation.

This I suppose possible in the case of some, but for you it is not so. The keen susceptibilities of your excitable nature will prevent your resting contented without sharing in the more exciting pleasures of the ball-room; and your powers of adaptation will easily tempt you forward to make use of at least some of those means of attracting general admiration which seem to succeed so well with others.

"Wherever there is life there is danger;" and the danger is probably in proportion to the degree of life. The more energy, the more feeling, the more genius possessed by an individual, the greater also are the temptations to which that individual is exposed. The path which is safe and harmless for the dull and inexcitable—the mere animals of the human race—is beset with dangers for the ardent, the enthusiastic, the intellectual. These must pay a heavy penalty for their superiority; but is it therefore a superiority they would resign? Besides, the very trials and temptations to which their superior vitality subjects them are not alone its necessary accompaniment, but also the necessary means for forming a superior character into eminent excellence.

Self-will, love of pleasure, quick excitability, and consequent irritability, are the marked ingredients in every strong character; its strength must be employed against itself to produce any high moral superiority.

There is an analogy between the metaphysical truths above spoken of and that fact in the physical history of the world, that coal-mines are generally placed in the neighbourhood of iron-mines. This is a provision involved in the nature of the thing itself; and we know that, without the furnaces thus placed within reach, the natural capabilities of the useful ore would never be developed.

In the same way, we know that an accompanying furnace of affliction and temptation is necessarily involved in that very strength of character which we admire; and also, that, without this fiery furnace, the vast capabilities of their nature, both moral and mental, could never be fully developed.

Suffering, sorrow, and temptations are the invariable conditions of a life of progress; and suffering, sorrow, and temptations are all of them always in proportion to the energies and capabilities of the character.

There is another analogy in animated nature, illustrative of the case of those who, without injury to themselves, (the injury to our neighbour is, as I said before, a different part of the subject,) may attend the ball-room, the theatre, and the race-course. Those animals lowest in the scale of creation, those who scarcely manifest one of the energies of vitality, are also those which are the least susceptible of suffering from external causes. The medusæ are supposed to feel no pain even in being devoured, and the human zoophyte is, in like manner, comparatively out of the reach of every suffering but death. Have you not seen some beings endowed with humanity nearly as destitute of a nervous system as the medusæ, nearly as insusceptible of any sensation from the accidents of life. Some of these, too, may possess virtue and piety as well as the animal qualities of patience and sweetness of temper, which are the mere results of their physical organization. No degree of effort or discipline, however, (indeed they bear within themselves no capabilities for either,) could enable such persons to become eminently useful, eminently respected, or eminently loved. They have doubtless some work appointed them to do, and that a necessary work in God's earthly kingdom; but theirs are inferior duties, very different from those which you, and such as you, are called on to fulfil.

Have I in any degree succeeded in reconciling you to the unvaryingly-accompanying penalties necessary to qualify the glad consciousness of possessing intellectual powers, a warm heart, and a strong mind? Your high position will indeed afford you far less happiness than that which may belong to the lower ranks in the scale of humanity; but the noble mind will soon be disciplined into dispensing with happiness;—it will find instead—blessedness.

If yours be a more difficult path than that of others, it is also a more honourable one: in proportion to the temptations endured will be the brightness of that "crown of life which the Lord hath promised to them that love him."[94]

But there is, perhaps, less necessity for trying to impress upon your mind a sense of your superiority than for urging upon you its accompanying responsibility, and the severe circumspection it calls upon you to exercise. Thus, from what I have above written, it necessarily follows that you cannot evade the question I am now pressing upon you by observing the effect of dissipation upon others, by bringing forward the example of many excellent women who have passed through the ordeal of dissipation untainted, and, still themselves possessing loving hearts and simple minds, are fearlessly preparing their daughters for the same dangerous course. Remember that those from whom you would shrink from a supposed equality on other points cannot be safely taken as examples for your own course of life. Your own concern is to ascertain the effect produced upon your own mind by different kinds of society, and to examine whether you yourself have the same healthy taste for simple pleasures and unexciting pursuits as before you engaged, even as slightly as you have already done, in the dissipation of a London season.

I once heard a young lady exclaim, when asked to accompany her family on a boating excursion, "Can any thing be more tiresome than a family party?" Young as she was, she had already lost all taste for the simple pleasures of domestic life. As she was intellectual and accomplished, she could still enjoy solitude; but her only ideas of pleasure as connected with a party were those of admiration and excitement. We may trace the same feelings in the complaints perpetually heard of the stupidity of parties,—complaints generally proceeding from those who are too much accustomed to attention and admiration to be contented with the unexciting pleasures of rational conversation, the exercise of kindly feelings, and the indulgence of social habits—all in their way productive of contentment to those who have preserved their mind in a state of freshness and simplicity. Any greater excitement than that produced by the above means cannot surely be profitable to those who only seek in society for so much pleasure as will afford them relaxation; those who engage in an arduous conflict with ever-watchful enemies both within and without ought carefully to avoid having their weapons of defence unstrung. I know that at present you would shrink from the idea of making pleasure your professed pursuit, from the idea of engaging in it for any other purpose but the one above stated—that of necessary relaxation; I should not otherwise have addressed you as I do now. Your only danger at present is, that you may, I should hope indeed unconsciously, acquire the habit of requiring excitement during your hours of relaxation.

In opposition to all that I have said, you will probably be often told that excitement, instead of being prejudicial, is favourable to the health of both mind and body; and this in some respects is true: the whole mental and physical constitution benefit by, and acquire new energy from, nay, they seem to develop hidden forces on occasions of natural excitement; but natural it ought to be, coming in the providential course of the events of life, and neither considered as an essential part of daily food, nor inspiring distaste for simple, ordinary nourishment. I fear much, on the other hand, any excitement that we choose for ourselves; that only is quite safe which is dispensed to us by the hand of the Great Physician of souls: he alone knows the exact state of our moral constitution, and the exact species of discipline it requires from hour to hour.

You will wonder, perhaps, that throughout the foregoing remonstrance I have never recommended to you the test so common among many good people of our acquaintance, viz. whether you are able to pray as devoutly on returning from a ball as after an evening spent at home? My reason for this silence was, that I have found the test an ineffectual one. The advanced Christian, if obedience to those who are set in authority over her should lead her into scenes of dissipation, will not find her mind disturbed by being an unwilling actor in the uninteresting amusements. She, on the other hand, who is just beginning a spiritual life, must be an incompetent judge of the variations in the devotional spirit of her mind,—anxious, besides, as one should be to discourage any of that minute attention to variations of religious feeling which only disturbs and harasses the mind, and hinders it from concentrating its efforts upon obedience. Lastly, she who has never been mindful of her baptismal vows of renunciation of the world, the flesh, and the devil, will "say her prayers" quite as satisfactorily to herself after a day spent in one manner as in another. The test of a distaste for former simple pursuits, and want of interest in them, is a much safer one, more universally applicable, and not so easily evaded. It is equally effectual, too, as a religious safeguard; for the natural and impressible state in which the mind is kept by the absence of habitual stimulants is surely the state in which it is best qualified for the exercise of devotion,—for self-denial, for penitence and prayer.

Let us return now to a further examination of the nature of the dangers to which you may be exposed by a life of gayety—an examination that must be carried on in your own mind with careful and anxious inquiry. I have before spoken of the duty of ascertaining what effects different kinds of society produce upon you: it is only by thus qualifying yourself to pass your own judgment on this important subject that you can avoid being dangerously influenced by those assertions that you hear made by others. You will probably, for instance, be told that a love of admiration often manifests itself as glaringly in the quiet drawing-room as in the crowded ball-room; and I readily admit that the feelings cherished into existence, or at least into vigour, by the exciting atmosphere of the latter cannot be readily laid aside with the ball-dress. There will, indeed, be less opportunity for their display, less temptation to the often accompanying feelings of envy and discontent, but the mental process will probably still be carried on—of distilling from even the most innocent pleasures but one species of dangerous excitement: I cannot, however, admit, that to the unsophisticated mind there will be any danger of the same nature in the one case as in the other. Society, when entered into with a simple, prayerful spirit, may be considered one of the most improving as well as one of the most innocent pleasures allotted to us. Still further, I believe that the exercise of patience, benevolence, and self-denial which it involves, is a most important part of the disciplining process by which we are being brought into a state of preparation for the society of glorified spirits, of "just men made perfect."

I advise you earnestly, therefore, against any system of conduct, or indulgence of feeling, that would involve your seclusion from society—not only on the grounds of such seclusion obliging you to unnecessary self-denial, but on the still stronger grounds of the loss to our moral being which would result from the absence of the peculiar species of discipline that social intercourse affords. My object in addressing you is to point out the dangers to you of peculiar kinds of society, not by any means to seek to persuade you to avoid it altogether.

Let us, then, consider carefully the respective tendencies of different kinds of society to cherish or create the feelings of "envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness," by exciting a craving for general admiration, and a desire to secure the largest portion for yourself.

You have already been a few weeks out in the world; you have been at small social parties and crowded balls: they must have given you sufficient experience to understand the remarks I make.

Have you not, then, felt at the quiet parties of which I have spoken (as contrasted with dissipated ones) that it was pleasure enough for you to spend your whole evening talking with persons of your own sex and age over the simple occupations o£ your daily-life, or the studies which engage the interest of your already cultivated mind? Lady L. may have collected a circle of admirers around her, and Miss M.'s music may have been extolled as worthy of an artist, but upon all this you looked merely as a spectator; without either wish or idea of sharing in their publicity or their renown, you probably did not form a thought, certainly not a wish, of the kind. In the ball-room, however, the case is altogether different; the most simple and fresh-minded woman cannot escape from feelings of pain or regret at being neglected or unobserved here. She goes for the professed purpose of dancing; and when few or no opportunities are afforded her of sharing in that which is the amusement of the rest of the room, should she feel neither mortification at her own position, nor envy, however disguised and modified, at the different position of others, she can possess none of that sensitiveness which is your distinctive quality. It is true, indeed, that the experienced chaperon is well aware that the girl who commands the greatest number of partners is not the one most likely to have the greatest number of proposals-at the end of the season, nor the one who will finally make the most successful parti. This reconciles the prudential looker-on to the occasional and partial appearance of neglect. Not so the young and inexperienced aspirant to admiration: her worldliness is now in an earlier phase; and she thinks that her fame rises or falls among her companions according as she can compete with them in the number of her partners, or their exclusive devotion to her, which after a season or two is discovered to be a still safer test of successful coquetry. Thus may the young innocent heart be gradually led on to depend for its enjoyment on the factitious passing admiration of a light and thoughtless hour; and still worse, if possessed of keen susceptibilities and powers of quick adaptation, the lesson is often too easily learned of practising the arts likely to attract notice, thus losing for ever the simplicity and modest freshness of a woman's nature. That may be a fatal evening to you on which you will first attract sufficient notice to have it said of you that you were more admired than Lucy D. or Ellen M.; this may be a moment for a poisonous plant to spring up in your heart, which will spread around its baleful influence until your dying day. It is a disputed point among ethical metaphysicians, whether the seeds of every vice are equally planted in each human bosom, and only prevented from germinating by opposing circumstances, and by the grace of God assisting self-control. If this be true, how carefully ought we to avoid every circumstance that may favour the commencing existence of before unknown sins and temptations. The grain that has been destitute of vitality for a score of centuries is wakened into unceasing, because continually renewed existence, by the fostering influences of light and air and a suitable soil. Evil tendencies may be slumbering in your bosom, as destitute of life, as incapable of growth, as the oats in the foldings of the mummy's envelope. Be careful lest, by going into the way of temptation, you may involuntarily foster them into the very existence which they would otherwise never possess.

When once the craving for excitement has become a part of our nature, there is of course no safety in the quietest, or, under other circumstances, most innocent kind of society. The same amusements will be sought for in it as those which have been enjoyed in the ball-room, and every company will be considered insufferably wearisome which does not furnish the now necessary stimulant of exclusive attention and general admiration.

I write the more strongly to you on the subject of worldly amusements, because I see with regret a tendency in the writings and conversation of the religious world, as it is called, to extol every other species of self-denial, but to Observe a studied silence respecting this one.

A reaction seems to have taken place in the public mind. Instead of the puritanic strictness that condemned the meeting of a few friends for any purposes besides those of reading the Scriptures and praying extempore, practices are now introduced, and favoured, and considered harmless, almost as strongly contrasted with the former ones as was the promulgation of the Book of Sports with the strict observances that preceded it. We see some, of whose piety and excellence no doubt can be entertained, mingling unhesitatingly in the most worldly amusements of those who are by profession as well as practice "lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God."

How cruelly are the minds of the simple and the timid perplexed by the persons who thus act, as well as by those popular writings which countenance in professedly religious persons these worldly and self-indulgent habits of life. The hearts and the consciences of the "weak brethren" re-echo the warnings given them by the average opinions of the wise and good in all ages of the world, namely, that, with respect to worldly amusements, they must "come out and be separate." How else can they be sons and daughters of Him, to whom they vowed, as the necessary condition of entering into that high relationship, that they would "renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world?" If the question of pomps should be perplexing to some by the different requirements of different stations in life, there is surely less difficulty of the same kind in relation to its vanities. But while the "weak in faith" are hesitating and trembling at the thought of all the opposition and sacrifices a self-denying course of conduct must, under any circumstances, involve, they are still further discouraged by finding that some whom they are accustomed to respect and admire have in appearance gone over to the enemy's camp.

It is only, indeed, in their hours of relaxation that they select as their favourite companions those who are professedly engaged in a different service from their own—those whom they know to be devoted heart and soul to the love and service of that "world which lieth in wickedness."[95] Are not, however, their hours of relaxation also their hours of danger—those in which they are more likely to be surprised and overcome by temptation than in hours of study or of business? All this is surely very perplexing to the young and inexperienced, however personally safe and prudent it may be for those from whom a better example might have been justly expected. It is deeply to be regretted that there is not more unity of action and opinion among those who "love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity," more especially in cases where such unity of action is only interfered with by dislike to the important and eminent Christian duty of self-denial.

I am inclined to apply terms of stronger and more general condemnation than any I have hitherto used to those amusements which are more especially termed "public."

You should carefully examine, with prayer to be guided aright, whether a voluntary attendance at the theatre or the race-course is not in a degree exposed to the solemn denunciation uttered by the Saviour against those who cause others to offend.[96] Can that relaxation be a part of the education to fit us for our eternal home which is regardless of danger to the spiritual interests of others, and acts upon the spirit of the haughty remonstrance of Cain—"Am I my brother's keeper?"[97] For all the details of this argument, I refer you to Wilberforce's "Practical View of Christianity." Many other writers besides have treated this subject ably and convincingly; but none other has ever been so satisfactory to my own mind: I think it will be so to yours. I am aware that much may be said in defence of the expediency of the amusements to which I refer; and as there is a certainty that both of them, or others of a similar nature, will meet with general support until "the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ,"[98] it is a compensatory satisfaction that they are neither of them without their advantages to the general welfare of the country; that good is mixed with their evil, as well as brought out of their evil. This does not, however, serve as an excuse for those who, having their mind and judgment enlightened to see the dangers to others and the temptations to themselves of attending such amusements, should still disfigure lives, it may be, in other respects, of excellence and usefulness, by giving their time, their money, and their example to countenance and support them. Wo to those who venture to lay their sinful human hands upon the complicated machinery of God's providence, by countenancing the slightest shade of moral evil, because there may be some accompanying good! We cannot look forward to a certain result from any action: the most virtuous one may produce effects entirely different from those which we had anticipated; and we can then only fearlessly leave the consequences in the hands of God, when we are sure that we have acted in strict accordance with His will. Does it become the servant of God voluntarily to expose herself to hear contempt and blasphemy attached to the Holy Name and the holy things which she loves; to see on the stage an awful mockery of prayer itself, on the race-course the despair of the ruined gambler and the debasement of the drunkard? The choice of the scenes you frequent now, of the company you keep now, is of an importance involved in the very nature of things, and not dependent alone on the expressed will of God. It is only the pure in heart who can see God.[99] It is only those who have here acquired a meetness for the inheritance of the saints in light[100] who can enjoy its possession.

It is almost entirely in this point of view that I have urged upon you the close consideration of the permanent influences of every present action. At your age, and with your inexperience, I know that there is an especial aptness to deceive one's-self by considering the case of those who, after leading a gay life for many years, have afterwards become the most zealous and devoted servants of God. That such cases are to be met with, is to the glory of the free grace of God: but what reason have you to hope that you should be among this small number? Having once wilfully chosen the pleasures of this life as your portion, on what promise do you depend ever again to be awakened to a sense of the awful alternative of fulfilling your baptismal vows, by renouncing the pomps and vanities of the world, or becoming a withered branch of the vine into which you were once grafted—a branch whose end is to be burned?

Without urging further upon you this hackneyed, though still awful warning, let me return once more to the peculiar point of view in which I have, all along, considered the subject; namely, that each present act and feeling, however momentary may be its indulgence, is an inevitable preparation for eternity, by becoming a part of our never-dying moral nature. You must deeply feel how much this consideration adds to the improbability of your having any desires whatever to become the servant of God some years hence, and how much it must increase in future every difficulty and every unwillingness which you at present experience.

Let us, however, suppose that God will still be merciful to you at the last; that, after having devoted to the world during the years of your youth that love, those energies, and those powers of mind which had been previously vowed to his holier and happier service, he will still in future years send you the grace of repentance; that he will effect such a change in your heart and mind, that the world does not only become unsatisfactory to you,—which is a very small way towards real religion,—but that to love and serve God becomes to you the one thing desirable above all others. Alas! it is even then, in the very hour of redeeming mercy, of renewing grace, that your severest trials will begin. Then first will you thoroughly experience how truly it is "an evil thing and bitter, to forsake the Lord your God."[101] Then you will find that every late effort at self-denial, simplicity of mind and purpose, abstinence from worldly excitements, &c., is met, not only by the evil instincts which belong to our nature, but by the superinduced difficulty of opposing confirmed habits.

Smoothly and tranquilly flows on the stream of habit, and we are unaware of its growing strength until we try to erect an obstacle in its course, and see this obstacle swept away by the long-accumulating power of the current.

In truth, all those who have wilfully added the power of evil habits to the evil tendencies of their fallen nature must expect "to go mourning all the days of their life." It is only to those who have served the Lord from their youth that "wisdom's ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths peace." To others, though by the grace of God they may be finally saved, there is but a dreary prospect until the end come. They must ever henceforth consult their safety by denying themselves many pleasant things which the well-regulated mind of the habitually pious may find not only safe but profitable. At the same time they sorrowfully discover that they have lost all taste for those entirely simple pleasures with which the path of God's obedient children is abundantly strewn. Their path, on the contrary, is rugged, and their flowers are few: their sun seldom shines; for they themselves have formed clouds out of the vapours of earth, to intercept its warming and invigorating radiance: what wonder, then, if some among them should turn it back into the bright and sunny land of self-indulgence, now looking brighter and more alluring than ever from its contrast with the surrounding gloom?

Let not this dangerous risk be yours. While yet young—young in habits, in energies, in affections, devote all to the service of the best of masters. "The work of righteousness," even now, through difficulties, self-denial, and anxieties, will be "peace, and the effect thereof quietness and assurance for ever."[102]

---

THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN ON SOCIETY.[103]

"Whatever may be the customs and laws of a country, women always give the tone to morals. Whether slaves or free, they reign, because their empire is that of the affections. This influence, however, is more or less salutary, according to the degree of esteem in which they are held:—they make men what they are. It seems as though Nature had made man's intellect depend upon their dignity, as she has made his happiness depend upon their virtue. This, then, is the law of eternal justice,—man cannot degrade woman without himself falling into degradation: he cannot elevate her without at the same time elevating himself. Let us cast our eyes over the globe! Let us observe those two great divisions of the human race, the East and the West. Half the old world remains in a state of inanity, under the oppression of a rude civilization: the women there are slaves; the other advances in equalization and intelligence: the women there are free and honoured.

"If we wish, then, to know the political and moral condition of a state, we must ask what rank women hold in it. Their influence embraces the whole life. A wife,—a mother,—two magical words, comprising the sweetest sources of man's felicity. Theirs is the reign of beauty, of love, of reason. Always a reign! A man takes counsel with his wife; he obeys his mother; he obeys her long after she has ceased to live, and the ideas which he has received from her become principles stronger even than his passions.

"The reality of the power is not disputed; but it may be objected that it is confined in its operation to the family circle: as if the aggregate of families did not constitute the nation! The man carries with him to the forum the notions which the woman has discussed with him by the domestic hearth. His strength there realizes what her gentle insinuations inspired. It is sometimes urged as matter of complaint that the business of women is confined to the domestic arrangements of the household: and it is not recollected that from the household of every citizen issue forth the errors and prejudices which govern the world!

"If, then, there be an incontestable fact, it is the influence of women: an influence extended, with various modifications, through the whole of life. Such being the case, the question arises, by what inconceivable negligence a power of universal operation has been overlooked by moralists, who, in their various plans for the amelioration of mankind, have scarcely deigned to mention this potent agent. Yet evidence, historical and parallel, proves that such negligence has lost to mankind the most influential of all agencies. The fact of its existence cannot be disputed; it is, therefore, of the greatest importance that its nature should be rightly understood, and that it be directed to right objects."[104]

It would not be uninteresting to trace the action and reaction by which women have degraded and been degraded—alternately the source and the victims of mistaken social principles; but it would be foreign to the design and compass of this work to do so. The subject, indeed, would afford matter for a philosophical treatise of deep interest, rather than for a chapter of a small work. A rapid historical sketch, and a few deductions which seem to bear upon the main point, are all that can be here attempted.

The gospel announced on this, as on every other subject, a grand comprehensive principle, which it was to be the work of ages (perhaps of eternity) to develop. The rescue of this degraded half of the human race was henceforth the ascertained will of the Almighty. But a long series of years were to elapse before this will worked out its issues. Its decrees, with the noble doctrines of which it formed a part, lay buried beneath the ruins of human intellect. But they were only buried, not destroyed; and rose, like wildflowers on a ruined edifice, to adorn the irregularity which they could not conceal. The fantastic institutions of chivalry which it is now the fashion to deride (how unjustly!) were among the first scions of this plant of heavenly origin. They bore the impress of heaven, faint and distorted indeed, but not to be mistaken! Devotion to an ideal good,—self-sacrifice,—subjugation of selfish and sensual feelings; wherever these principles are found, disguised, disfigured though they be, they are not of the earth,—earthly. They, like the fabled amaranth, are plants which are not indigenous here below! The seeds must come from above, from the source of all that is pure, of all that is good! Of these principles the gospel was the remote source: women were the disseminators. "Shut up in their castellated towers, they civilized the warriors who despised their weakness, and rendered less barbarous the passions and prejudices which themselves shared."[105] It was they who directed the savage passions and brute force of men to an unselfish aim, the defence of the weak, and added to courage the only virtue then recognised—humanity. "Thus chivalry prepared the way for law, and civilization had its source in gallantry."[106]

At this epoch, the influence of women was decidedly beneficial; happy for them and for society if it had continued to be so! If we attempt to trace the source of this influence, we shall find it in the intellectual equality of the two sexes; equally ignorant of what we call knowledge, the respect due by men to virtue and beauty was not checked by any disdain of real or fancied superiority on their part.

The intellectual exercises (chiefly imaginative) of the time, so far from forming a barrier between the two sexes, were a bond of union. The song of the minstrel was devoted to the praise of beauty, and paid by her smile. The spirit of the age, as imbodied in these effusions, is the best proof of the beneficial influence exercised over that age by our sex. In them, the name of woman is not associated in the degrading catalogue of man's pleasures, with his bottle and his horse, but is coupled with all that is fair and pure in nature,—the fields, the birds, the flowers; or high in virtue or sentiment,—with honour, glory, self-sacrifice.

To the age of chivalry succeeded the revival of letters; and (strange to say!) this revival was any thing but advantageous to the cause of women. Men found other paths to glory than the exercise of valour afforded, and paths into which women were forbidden to follow them. Into these newly-discovered regions, women were not allowed to penetrate, and men returned thence with real or affected contempt for their unintellectual companions, without having attained true wisdom enough to know how much they would gain by their enlightenment.

The advance of intelligence in men not being met by a corresponding advance in women, the latter lost their equilibrium in the social balance. Honour, glory, were no longer attached to the smile of beauty. The dethroned sovereigns, from being imperious, became abject, and sought, by paltry arts, to perpetuate the empire which was no longer conceded as a right. Influence they still possessed, but an influence debased in its character, and changed in its mode of operation. Instead of being the objects of devotion of heart,—fantastic, indeed, but high-minded,—they became the mere playthings of the imagination, or worse, the mere objects of sensual passion. Respect is the only sure foundation of influence. Women had ceased to be respected: they therefore ceased to be beneficially influential. That they retained another and a worse kind of influence, may be inferred from the spirit, as imbodied in the literature, of the period. Fiction no longer sought its heroes among the lofty in mind and pure in morals—its heroines in spotless virgins and faithful wives. The reckless voluptuary, the faithless and successful adulteress,—these were the noble beings whose deeds filled the pages which formed the delight of the wise and the fair. The ultimate issues of these grievous errors were most strikingly developed in the respective courts of Louis XIV. and Charles II., where they reached their climax. The vicious influence of which we have spoken was then at its height, and the degradation of women had brought on its inevitable consequence, the degradation of men. With some few exceptions, (such exceptions, indeed, prove rules!) we trace this evil influence in the contempt of virtue, public and private; in the base passions, the narrow and selfish views peculiar to degraded women, and reflected on the equally degraded men whom such women could have power to charm.[107]

A change of opinions and of social arrangements has long been operating, which ought entirely to have abrogated these evils. That they have not done so is owing to a grand mistake. Women having recovered their rights, moral and intellectual, have resumed their importance in the eye of reason: they have long been the ornaments of society, which from them derives its tone, and it has become too much the main object of their education to cultivate the accomplishments which may make them such. A twofold injury has arisen from this mistaken aim; it has blinded women as to the true nature and end of their existence, and has excited a spirit of worldly ambition opposed to the devoted unselfishness necessary for its accomplishment. This is the error of the unthinking—the reflecting have fallen into another, but not less serious one. The coarse, but expressive satire of Luther, "That the human mind is like an intoxicated man on horseback,—if he is set up on one side, he falls off on the other," was never more fully justified than on this subject. Because it is perceived that women have a dignity and value greater than society or themselves have discovered,—because their talents and virtues place them on a footing of equality with men, it is maintained that their present sphere of action is too contracted a one, and that they ought to share in the public functions of the other sex. Equality, mental and physical, is proclaimed! This is matter too ludicrous to be treated anywhere but in a professed satire; in sober earnest, it may be asked, upon what grounds so extraordinary a doctrine is built up! Were women allowed to act out these principles, it would soon appear that one great range of duty had been left unprovided for in the schemes of Providence; such an omission would be without parallel. Two principal points only can here be brought forward, which oppose this plan at the very outset; they are—

1st. Placing the two sexes in the position of rivals, instead of coadjutors, entailing the diminution of female influence.

2d. Leaving the important duties of woman only in the hands of that part of the sex least able to perform them efficiently.

The principle of divided labour seems to be a maxim of the Divine government, as regards the creature. It is only by a concentration of powers to one point, that so feeble a being as man can achieve great results. Why should we wish to set aside this salutary law, and disturb the beautiful simplicity of arrangement which has given to man the power, and to woman the influence, to second the plans of Almighty goodness? They are formed to be co-operators, not rivals, in this great work; and rivals they would undoubtedly become, if the same career of public ambition and the same rewards of success were open to both. Woman, at present, is the regulating power of the great social machine, retaining, through the very exclusion complained of, the power to judge of questions by the abstract rules of right and wrong—a power seldom possessed by those whose spirits are chafed by opposition and heated by personal contest.

The second resulting evil is a grave one, though, in treating of it, also, it is difficult to steer clear of ludicrous associations. The political career being open to women, it is natural to suppose that all the most gifted of the sex would press forward to confer upon their country the benefit of their services, and to reap for themselves the distinction which such services would obtain; the duties hitherto considered peculiar to the sex would sink to a still lower position in public estimation than they now hold, and would be abandoned to those least able conscientiously to fulfil them. The combination of legislative and maternal duties would indeed be a difficult task, and, of course, the least ostentatious would be sacrificed.

Yet women have a mission! ay, even a political mission of immense importance! which they will best fulfil by moving in the sphere assigned them by Providence: not comet-like, wandering in irregular orbits, dazzling indeed by their brilliancy, but terrifying by their eccentric movements and doubtful utility. That the sphere in which they are required to move is no mean one, and that its apparent contraction arises only from a defect of intellectual vision, it is the object of the succeeding chapters to prove.

---

THE SPHERE OF WOMAN'S INFLUENCE.

"The fact of this influence being proved, it is of the utmost importance that it be impressed upon the mind of women, and that they be enlightened as to its true nature and extent."

The task is as difficult as it is important, for it demands some exercise of sober judgment to view it with requisite impartiality; it requires, too, some courage to encounter the charge of inconsistency which a faithful discharge of it entails. For it is an apparent inconsistency to recommend at the same time expansion of views and contraction of operation; to awaken the sense of power, and to require that the exercise of it be limited; to apply at once the spur and the rein. That intellect is to be invigorated only to enlighten conscience—that conscience is to be enlightened only to act on details—that accomplishments and graces are to be cultivated only, or chiefly, to adorn obscurity;—a list of somewhat paradoxical propositions indeed, and hard to be received; yet, upon their favourable reception depends, in my opinion, the usefulness of our influence, the destinies of our race; and it is my intention to direct all my observations to this point.

It is astonishing and humiliating to perceive how frequently human wisdom, especially argumentative wisdom, is at fault as to results, while accident, prejudices, or common sense seem to light upon truths which reason feels after without finding. It appears as though à priori reasoning, human nature being the subject, is like a skilful piece of mechanism, carefully and scientifically put together, but which some perverse and occult trifle will not permit to act. This is eminently true of many questions regarding education, and precisely the state of the argument concerning the position and duties of women. The facts of moral and intellectual equality being established, it seems somewhat irrational to condemn women to obscurity and detail for their field of exertion, while men usurp the extended one of public usefulness. And a good case may be made out on this very point. Yet the conclusions are false and pernicious, and the prejudices which we now smile at as obsolete are truths of nature's own imparting, only wanting the agency of comprehensive intelligence to make them valuable, by adapting them to the present state of society. For, as one atom of falsehood in first principles nullifies a whole theory, so one principle, fundamentally true, suffices to obviate many minor errors. This fundamentally true principle, I am prepared to show, exists in the established opinions concerning the true sphere of women, and that, whether originally dictated by reason, or derived from a sort of intuition, they are right, and for this cause: the one quality on which woman's value and influence depend is the renunciation of self; and the old prejudices respecting her inculcated self-renunciation. Educated in obscurity, trained to consider the fulfilment of domestic duties as the aim and end of her existence, there was little to feed the appetite for fame, or the indulgence of self-idolatry. Now, here the principle fundamentally bears upon the very qualities most desirable to be cultivated, and those most desirable to be avoided. A return to the practical part of the system is by no means to be recommended, for, with increasing intellectual advantages, it is not to be supposed that the perfection of the conjugal character is to consult a husband's palate and submit to his ill-humour—or of the maternal, to administer in due alternation the sponge and the rod. All that is contended for is, that the fundamental principle is right—"that women were to live for others;" and, therefore, all that we have to do is to carry out this fundamentally right principle into wider application. It may easily be done, if the cultivation of intellectual powers be carried on with the same views and motives as were formerly the knowledge of domestic duties, for the benefit of immediate relations, and for the fulfilment of appointed duties. If society at large be benefited by such cultivation, so much the better; but it ought to be no part of the training of women to consider, with any personal views, what effect they shall produce in or on society at large. The greatest benefit which they can confer upon society is to be what they ought to be in all their domestic relations; that is, to be what they ought to be, in all the comprehensiveness of the term, as adapted to the present state of society. Let no woman fancy that she can, by any exertion or services, compensate for the neglect of her own peculiar duties as such. It is by no means my intention to assert that women should be passive and indifferent spectators of the great political questions which affect the well-being of community; neither can I repeat the old adage, that "women have nothing to do with politics." They have, and ought to have much to do with politics. But in what way? It has been maintained that their public participation in them would be fatal to the best interests of society. How, then, are women to interfere in politics? As moral agents; as representatives of the moral principle; as champions of the right in preference to the expedient; by their endeavours to instil into their relatives of the other sex the uncompromising sense of duty and self-devotion, which ought to be their ruling principles! The immense influence which women possess will be most beneficial, if allowed to flow in its natural channels, viz. domestic ones,—because it is of the utmost importance to the existence of influence, that purity of motive be unquestioned. It is by no means affirmed that women's political feelings are always guided by the abstract principles of right and wrong; but they are surely more likely to be so, if they themselves are restrained from the public expression of them. Participation in scenes of popular emotion has a natural tendency to warp conscience and overcome charity. Now, conscience and charity (or love) are the very essence of woman's beneficial influence; therefore every thing tending to blunt the one and sour the other is sedulously to be avoided by her. It is of the utmost importance to men to feel, in consulting a wife, a mother, or a sister, that they are appealing from their passions and prejudices, and not to them, as imbodied in a second self: nothing tends to give opinions such weight as the certainty that the utterer of them is free from all petty or personal motives. The beneficial influence of woman is nullified if once her motives, or her personal character, come to be the subject of attack; and this fact alone ought to induce her patiently to acquiesce in the plan of seclusion from public affairs.

It supposes, indeed, some magnanimity in the possessors of great powers and widely extended influence, to be willing to exercise them with silent, unostentatious vigilance. There must be a deeper principle than usually lies at the root of female education, to induce women to acquiesce in the plan, which, assigning to them the responsibility, has denied them the éclat of being reformers of society. Yet it is, probably, exactly in proportion to their reception of this truth, and their adoption of it into their hearts, that they will fulfil their own high and lofty mission; precisely because the manifestation of such a spirit is the one thing needful for the regeneration of society. It is from her being the depository and disseminator of such a spirit, that woman's influence is principally derived. It appears to be for this end that Providence has so lavishly endowed her with moral qualities, and, above all, with that of love,—the antagonist spirit of selfish worldliness, that spirit which, as it is vanquished or victorious, bears with it the moral destinies of the world! Now, it is proverbially as well as scripturally true, that love "seeketh not its own" interest, but the good of others, and finds its highest honour, its highest happiness, in so doing. This is precisely the spirit which can never be too much cultivated by women, because it is the spirit by which their highest triumphs are to be achieved: it is they who are called upon to show forth its beauty, and to prove its power; every thing in their education should tend to develop self-devotion and self-renunciation. How far existing systems contribute to this object, it must be our next step to inquire.

---

EDUCATION OF WOMEN.

"The education of women is more important than that of men, since that of men is always their work."[108]

We are now to consider how far the present systems of female education tend to the great end here mentioned—the truth of which, reflection and experience combine to prove. Great is the boast of the progress of education; great would be the indignation excited by a doubt as to the fact of this progress. "A simple question will express this doubt more forcibly, and place this subject in a stronger light: 'Are women qualified to educate men?' If they are not, no available progress has been made. In the very heart of civilized Europe, are women what they ought to be? and does not their education prove how little we know the consequences of neglecting it?"[109] Is it possible to believe, that upon their training depends the happiness of families—the well-being of nations? The selfishness, political and social; the forgetfulness of patriotism; the unregulated tempers and low ambition of the one sex, testify but too clearly how little has been done by the vaunted education of the other. For education is useless, or at least neutral, if it do not bear upon duty, as well as upon cultivation, if it do not expand the soul, while it enlightens the intellect.

How far expansion of soul, or enlightenment of intellect, is to be expected from the present systems of female education, we have seen in effects,—let us now go back to causes.

It is unnecessary to start from the prejudice of ignorance; it is now universally acknowledged that women have a right to education, and that they must be educated. We smile with condescending pity at the blinded state of our respected grandmothers, and thank God that we are not as they, with a thanksgiving as uncalled for as that of the proud Pharisee. On abstract ground, their education was better than ours; it was a preparation for their future duties. It does not affect the question, that their notion of these duties was entirely confined to the physical comfort of husbands and children. The defect of the scheme, as has been argued, was not in rationality, but in comprehensiveness,—a fundamentally right principle being the basis, it is easy to extend the application of it indefinitely.

Indiscriminate blame, however, is as invidious as it is useless; if the fault-finder be not also the fault-mender, the exercise of his powers is, at best, but a negative benefit. Let us, therefore, enter into a calm examination of the two principal ramifications, into which education has insensibly divided itself, as far as the young women of our own country are concerned; bearing in mind that women can only exercise their true influence, inasmuch as they are free from worldly-mindedness and egotism, and that, therefore, no system of education can be good which does not tend to subdue the selfish and bring out the unselfish principle. The systems alluded to are these:—

1st. The education of accomplishments for shining in society.

2d. Intellectual education, or that of the mental powers.

What are the objects of either? To prepare the young for life; its subsequent trials; its weighty duties; its inevitable termination? We will examine the principles on which both these educations are made to work, and see whether, or how far, they have any relation to those most called for, by the future and presumed duties of the educated. The worldly and the intellectual, alternately objects of contempt to each other, are equally objects of pity to the wise, as mistaken in their end, and deceived as to the means of attaining that end.

The education of accomplishments, (especially as conducted in this country,) would be a risible, if it were not a painful subject of contemplation. Intense labour; immense sums of money; hours, nay, days of valuable time! What a list of sacrifices! Now for results. Of the many who thus sacrifice time, health, and property, how few attain even a moderate proficiency. The love of beauty, the power of self-amusement (if obtained) might, in some degree, justify these sacrifices; they are valuable ends in themselves, still more valuable from contingent advantages. There is a deep influence hidden under these beautiful arts,—an influence far deeper than the world in its thoughtlessness, or the worldly student in his vanity, ever can know,—an influence refining, consoling, elevating: they afford a channel into which the lofty aspirings, the unsatisfied yearnings of the pure and elevated in soul may pour themselves. The perception of the beautiful is, next to the love of our fellow-creatures, the most purely unselfish of all our natural emotions, and is, therefore, a most powerful engine in the hands of those who regard selfishness as the giant passion, whose castle must be stormed before any other conquest can be begun, and in vanquishing whom all lawful and innocent weapons should, by turns, be employed.

Let us consider how we employ this mighty ally of virtue and loftiness of soul. Into the cultivation of the arts, disguised under the hackneyed name of accomplishments, does one particle of intellectuality creep? Would not many of their ablest professors and most diligent practitioners stare, with unfeigned wonder, at the supposition, that the five hours per diem devoted to the piano and the easel had any other object than to accomplish the fingers? The idea of their influencing the head would be ridiculous! of their improving the heart, preposterous! Yet if both head and heart do not combine in these pursuits, how can the cultivators justify to themselves the devotion of time and labour to their acquisition: time and labour, in many cases, abstracted from the performance of present, or preparation for future duties,—this is especially applicable to the middle classes of society.

Let us now turn to the issues of this education! The accomplishments acquired at such cost must be displayed. To whom? the possessor has no delight in them,—her immediate relatives, perhaps, no taste for them;—to strangers, therefore. It is not necessary to make many strictures on this subject; the rage for universal exhibition has been written and talked down: in fact, there are great hopes for the world in this particular; it has descended so low in the scale of society, that we trust it will soon be exploded altogether. The fashion, therefore, need not be here treated of, but the spirit which it has engendered, and which will survive its parent. This, as influencing the female character—especially the maternal—bears greatly upon the point in view;—to live for the applause of the foolish many, instead of the approbation of the well-judging few; to rule duty, conscience, morals, by a low worldly standard; to view worldly admiration as the aim, and worldly aggrandizement as the end of life; these are a few,—a very few, indications of this spirit, and these have infected every rank, from the highest to the middle and lower classes of society. To every thing gentle or refined, to every thing lofty or dignified in the female character, this spirit is utterly opposed. Refinement would teach to shun the vulgar applause which almost insults its object,—dignity would shrink from displaying before heartless crowds those emotions of the soul, without which all art is vulgar,—and how can women, who have neither refinement nor dignity, retail that influence which, rightly used, is to be so great an engine in the regeneration of society? How can the vain and selfish exhibitor of paltry acquirements ever mature into the mother of the Gracchi, the tutelary guardian of the rising virtues of the commonwealth? It is in vain to hope it.

Before making any strictures on intellectual education, it is necessary to enter into a short explanation; for it is not denied that rightly-cultivated mental power is a great good. The kind of cultivation which is here decried is open to the same objections as the last mentioned. It is the cultivation of power, with a view, not to the happiness of the individual, but to her fame; not to her usefulness, but to her brilliancy. We have only to look round society, and see that intellect has its vanity as well as beauty or accomplishments, and that its effects are more mischievous. It has a hardening, deadening kind of influence; the more so, that the so-called mental cultivation frequently consists only of a pedantic heaping up of information, valuable indeed in itself, but wanting the principle of combination to make it useful. Stones and bricks are valuable things, very valuable; but they are not beautiful or useful till the hand of the architect has given them a form, and the cement of the bricklayer has knit them together. It is a fine expression of Miss Edgeworth, in speaking of the mind of one of her heroines, "that the stream of literature had passed over it was apparent only from its fertility." Intellectual cultivation was too long considered as education, properly so called. The mischief which this error has produced, is exactly in proportion to the increase of power thereby communicated to wrong principles.

What, then, is the true object of female education? The best answer to this question is, a statement of future duties; for it must never be forgotten, that if education be not a training for future duties, it is nothing. The ordinary lot of woman is to marry. Has any thing in these educations prepared her to make a wise choice in marriage? To be a mother! Have the duties of maternity,—the nature of moral influence,—been pointed out to her? Has she ever been enlightened as to the consequent unspeakable importance of personal character as the source of influence? In a word, have any means, direct or indirect, prepared her for her duties? No! but she is a linguist, a pianist, graceful, admired. What is that to the purpose? The grand evil of such an education is the mistaking means for ends; a common error, and the source of half the moral confusion existing in the world. It is the substitution of the part for a whole. The time when young women enter upon life, is the one point to which all plans of education tend, and at which they all terminate: and to prepare them for that point is the object of their training. Is it not cruel to lay up for them a store of future wretchedness, by an education which has no period in view but one; a very short one, and the most unimportant and irresponsible of the whole of life? Who that had the power of choice would choose to buy the admiration of the world for a few short years with the happiness of a whole life? the temporary power to dazzle and to charm, with the growing sense of duties undertaken only to be neglected, and responsibilities the existence of which is discovered perhaps simultaneously with that of an utter inability to meet them? Even if the mischief stopped here, it would be sufficiently great; but the craving appetite for applause once roused, is not so easily lulled again. The moral energies, pampered by unwholesome nourishment,—like the body when disordered by luxurious dainties,—refuse to perform their healthy functions, and thus is occasioned a perpetual strife and warfare of internal principles; the selfish principle still seeking the accustomed gratification, the conjugal and maternal prompting to the performance of duty. But duty is a cold word; and people, in order to find pleasure in duty, must have been trained to consider their duties as pleasures. This is a truth at which no one arrives by inspiration! And in this moral struggle, which, like all other struggles, produces lassitude and distaste of all things, the happiness of the individual is lost, her usefulness destroyed, her influence most pernicious. For nothing has so injurious an effect on temper and manners, and consequently on moral influence, as the want of that internal quiet which can only arise from the accordance of duty with inclination. Another most pernicious effect is, the deadening within the heart of the feeling of love, which is the root of all influence; for it is an extraordinary fact, that vanity acts as a sort of refrigerator on all men—on the possessor of it, and on the observer.

Now, if conscientiousness and unselfishness be the two main supports of women's beneficial influence, how can any education be good which has not the cultivation of these qualities for its first and principal object? The grand objects, then, in the education of women, ought to be, the conscience, the heart, and the affections; the development of those moral qualities which Providence has so liberally bestowed upon them, doubtless with a wise and beneficent purpose. Originators of conscientiousness, how can they implant what they have never cultivated, nor brought to maturity in themselves? Sovereigns of the affections, how can they direct the kingdom whose laws they have not studied, the springs of whose government are concealed from them? The conscience and the affections being primarily enlightened, all other cultivation, as secondary, is most valuable. Intelligence, accomplishments, even external elegance, become objects of importance, as assisting the influence which women have, and exert too often for unworthy ends, but which in this case could not fail to be beneficial. Let the light of intellect and the charm of accomplishments be the willing handmaids of cultivated and enlightened conscience. Cultivate the intellect with reference to the conscience, that views of duty may be comprehensive, as well as just; cultivate the imagination still with reference to the conscience, that those inward aspirations which all indulge, more or less, may be turned from the gauds of an idle and vain imagination, and shed over daily life and daily duty the halo of a poetic influence; cultivate the manners, that the qualities of heart and head may have an additional auxiliary in obtaining that influence by which a mighty regeneration is to be worked. The issues of such an education will justify the claims made for women in these pages; then the spirit of vanity will yield to the spirit of self-devotion: that spirit confessedly natural to Women, and only perverted by wrong education. Content with the sphere of usefulness assigned her by Nature and Nature's God, viewing that sphere with the piercing eye of intellect, and gilding it with the beautiful colours of the imagination, she will cease the vain and almost impious attempt to wander from it. She will see and acknowledge the beauty, the harmony of the arrangement which has made her physical inferiority (the only inferiority which we acknowledge) the very root from which spring her virtues and their attendant influences. Removed from the actual collision of political contests, and screened from the passions which such engender, she brings party questions to the test of the unalterable principles of reason and religion; she is, so to speak, the guardian angel of man's political integrity, liable at the best to be warped by passion or prejudice, and excited by the rude clashing of opinions and interests. This is the true secret of woman's political influence, the true object of her political enlightenment. Governments will never be perfect till all distinction between private and public virtue, private and public honour, be done away! Who so fit an agent for the operation of this change as enlightened, unselfish woman? Who so fit, in her twofold capacity of companion and early instructor, to teach men to prefer honour to gain, duty to ease, public to private interests, and God's work to man's inventions? And shall it be said that women have no political existence, no political influence, when the very germs of political regeneration may spring from them alone, when the fate of nations yet unborn may depend upon the use which they make of the mighty influences committed to their care? The blindness which sees not how these influences would be lessened by taking her out of the sphere assigned by Providence, if voluntary, is wicked—if real, is pitiable. As well might we desire the earth's beautiful satellite to give place to a second sun, thereby producing the intolerable and glaring continuity of perpetual day. Those who would be the agents of Providence must observe the workings of Providence, and be content to work also in that way, and by those means, which Almighty wisdom appoints. There is infinite littleness in despising small things. It seems paradoxical to say that there are no small things; our littleness and our aspiration make things appear small. There are, morally speaking, no small duties. Nothing that influences human virtue and happiness can be really trifling,—and what more influences them than the despised, because limited, duties assigned to woman? It is true, her reward (her task being done) is not of this world, nor will she wish it to be—enough for her to be one of the most active and efficient agents in her heavenly Father's work of man's regeneration,—enough for her that generations yet unborn shall rise up and call her blessed.

---

LOVE—MARRIAGE.

The conventual and monastic origin of all systems of education has had a very injurious influence, on that of women especially, because the conventual spirit has been longer retained in it.

If no education be good which does not bear upon the future duties of the educated, it follows that the systematic exclusion of any one subject connected with, or bearing upon, future duties, must be an evil. The wisdom of employing those who had renounced the world to form the minds of those who were to mix in it, to be exposed in all its allurements, to share in all its duties, was doubtful indeed; and the danger was enhanced by the fact, that the majority of recluses were any thing but indifferent to the world which they had renounced. The convent was too often the refuge of disappointed worldliness, the grave of blasted hopes, or the prison of involuntary victims; a withering atmosphere this in which to place warm young hearts, and expect them to expand and flourish. The evil effects would be varied according to the different characters submitted to its influence. The sensitive entered upon life oppressed with fears and terrors; with a conscience morbid, not enlightened; bewildered by the impossibility of reconciling principles and duties. The ardent and sanguine, longing to escape from restraint, pictured to themselves, in these unknown and untried regions, delights infinite and unvaried; and, seeing the incompatibility of inculcated principles and worldly pleasures, discarded principle altogether. It is needless to pursue this subject further, because a universal assent will (in this country, at least,) await the remarks here made; their applicability to what follows may not at first be so apparent. The conventual spirit has survived conventual institutions,—in the department of female education especially.

In the first place, the instructors of female youth are considered respectable and trustworthy only in proportion as they cease to be young, or at least in proportion as they appear to forget that they ever were so. Any touch of sympathy for the follies of childhood, or the indiscretions of youth, would blast the prospects of a candidate for that honourable office, and, in the opinion of many, render her unfit for its fulfilment. The unfitness is attached to the opposite disposition; for the very fact of its existence is as effectual an obstacle to her being a good trainer of youth, as if she had taken a vow never to see the world but through an iron grating. Experience can never benefit youth, except when combined with indulgence. The instructor who, from the heights of past temptations and subdued passion, looks down with cool watchfulness on the struggles of his youthful pupil, will see him lie floundering in the mire, or perishing in the deep water. He must retrace his own steps, take him by the hand, and sustain him, till he is passed the dangerous and slippery paths of youth. He must become as a little child to the young and frail being committed to his care, and whose welfare and safety depend (in great measure) upon him. A cold and unloving admiration never will produce imitation: it is like the hopeless love of poor Helena:—

'Twere all as one as I should love a bright particular star!

Here, then, the conventual spirit has been in injurious operation;—no less so on other points.

This conventual prejudice has banished from our school-rooms the name of love, and presented to their youthful inmates fragments instead of books, cramped and puny publications instead of the works of master-spirits, lest the mind should be contaminated by any allusion to that passion contained in them. The wisdom of such a proceeding is much upon a par with that which devoted the feet to stocks and the shoulders to backboards, in order to make them elegant, and denied them heaven's air and active exercise through care for their health. The result, in the one case as in the other, is disease and distortion. Nature will assert her rights over the beings she has made; and she avenges, by the production of deformity, all attempts to force or shackle her operations. The golden globe could not check the expansive force of water; equally useless is it to attempt any check on the expansive force of mind,—it will ooze out! We ought long ago to have been convinced that the only power allowed to us is the power of direction. If one-half the amount of effort expanded to useless endeavours to cramp and check, had been turned towards this channel, how different would be the results! It is true that it is easier to check than to guide,—to fetter than to restrain; and that to attempt to remove evil by the first-occurring remedy is a natural impulse. But a pause should by made, lest in applying the remedy a worse evil be not engendered. Distorted spines and "pale consumptions," the result of the one mistake, are trifling evils, when compared with the moral evils resulting from the other. For if, as is affirmed, no education can be good which does not bear upon future duties, how can that be wise which keeps love and its temptations, maternity and its responsibilities, out of view? Who would believe that this love, so denounced, so guarded against, so carefully banished from the minds of young women, is the one principle on which their future happiness may be founded or wrecked? It is sure to seek them, (most of them, at least,) like death in the fable, to find them unprepared,—too often to leave them wretched.

Meanwhile, these exaggerated precautions in the education of one sex have been met by equally fatal negligence in the education of the other; and while to girls have been denied the very thoughts of love,—even in its noblest and purest form,—the most effeminate and corrupt productions of the heathen writers have been unhesitatingly laid open to boys; so that the two sexes, on whose respective notions of the passion depends the ennobling or the degrading of their race, meet on these terms:—the men know nothing of love but what they have imbibed from an impure and polluted source; the women, nothing at all, or nothing but what they have clandestinely gathered from sources almost equally corrupt. The deterioration of any feeling must follow from such injudicious training, more especially a feeling so susceptible as love of assuming such differing aspects.

Let no sober-minded person be startled at the deductions hence drawn, that it is foolish to banish all thoughts of love from the minds of the young. Since it is certain that girls will think, though they may not read or speak, of love; and that no early care can preserve them from being exposed, at a later period, to its temptations, might it not be well to use here the directing, not the repressing power? Since women will love, might it not be as well to teach them to love wisely? Where is the wisdom of letting the combatant go unarmed into the field, in order to spare him the prospect of a combat? Are not women made to love, and to be loved: and does not their future destiny too often depend upon this passion? And yet the conventual prejudice which banishes its name subsists still.

"Mothers forget, in presence of their children, all the dangers with which this prejudice has surrounded themselves; the illusions which arise from that ignorance, and the weakness which springs from those illusions. To open the minds of the young to the nature of true love, is to arm them against the frivolous passions which usurp its name, for in exalting the faculties of the soul, we annihilate, in a great degree, the delusions of the senses."[110]

Examine the first choice of a young girl. Of all the qualities which please her in a lover, there is, perhaps, not one which is valuable in a husband. Is not this the most complete condemnation of all our systems of education? From the fear of too much agitating the heart, we hide from women all that is worthy of love, all the depth and dignity of that passion when felt for a worthy object;—their eye is captivated, the exterior pleases, the heart and mind are not known, and, after six months union, they are surprised to find the beau ideal metamorphosed into a fool or a coxcomb. This is the issue of what are ordinarily called love-matches, because they are considered as such. "Cupid is indeed often blamed for deeds in which he has no share." In the opinion of the wise, the mischief is occasioned by the action of vivid imaginations upon minds unprepared by previous reflection on the subject; that is, by the entire banishment of all thoughts of love from education. We should endeavour, then, to engrave on the soul a model of virtue and excellence, and teach young women to regulate their affections by an approximation to this model; the result would not be an increased facility in giving the affections, but a greater difficulty in so doing; for women, whose blindness and ignorance now make them the victims of fancied perfections, would be able to make a clear-sighted appreciation of all that is excellent, and have an invincible repugnance to an union not founded upon that basis. Love, in the common acceptation of the term, is a folly,—love, in its purity, its loftiness, its unselfishness, is not only a consequence, but a proof of our moral excellence,—the sensibility to moral beauty, the forgetfulness of self in the admiration engendered by it, all prove its claim to be a high moral influence; it is the triumph of the unselfish over the selfish part of our nature.[111]

What is meant by educating young women to love wisely is simply this, that they be taught to distinguish true love from the false spirit which usurps its name and garb; that they be taught to abstract from it the worldliness, vanity, and folly, with which it has been mixed up. They should be taught that it is not to be the amusement of an idle hour; the indulgence of a capricious and greedy vanity; the ladder, by the assistance of which they may climb a few steps higher in the grades of society; in short, that except it owe its origin to the noble qualities of heart and mind, it is nothing but a contemptible weakness, to be pitied perhaps, but not to be indulged or admired.

When the might influence of this passion is considered, the important relations and weighty responsibilities to which it gives rise, we have reason to be astonished at the levity with which the subject is treated by the world at large, and the unconsciousness and indifference with which those responsibilities are assumed. It is like the madman who flings about firebrands and calls it sport. The remedy for this evil must begin with the sex who have in their hands that powerful influence, the liberty of rejection. Let them not complain that liberty of choice is not theirs; it would only increase their responsibilities without adding to their happiness or to their usefulness. The liberty which they do possess is amply sufficient to insure for them the power of being benefactors of mankind. As soon as the noble and elevated of our sex shall refuse to unite on any but moral and intellectual grounds with the other, so soon will a mighty regeneration begin to be effected: and this end will, perhaps, be better served by the simple liberty of rejection than by liberty of choice. Rejection is never inflicted without pain; it is never received without humiliation, however unfounded, (for simply to want the power of pleasing can be no disgrace;) but in the existence of this conventional feeling we find the source of a deep influence. If women would, as by one common league and covenant, agree to use this powerful engine in defence of morals, what a change might they not effect in the tone of society! Is it not a subject that ought to crimson every woman's cheek with shame, that the want of moral qualifications is generally the very last cause of rejection? If the worldly find the wealth, and the intellectual the intelligence, which they seek in a companion, there are few who will not shut their eyes in wilful and convenient blindness to the want of such qualifications. It is a fatal error which has bound up the cause of affection so intimately with worldly considerations; and it is a growing evil. The increasing demands of luxury in a highly civilized community operate most injuriously on the cause of disinterested affections, and particularly so in the case of women, who are generally precluded from maintaining or advancing their place in society by any other schemes than matrimonial ones. I might say something here on the cruelty of that conventional prejudice which shackles the independence of women, by attaching the loss of caste to almost all, nay, all, of the very few sources of pecuniary emolument open to them. It requires great strength of principle to disregard this prejudice; and while urged by duty to inveigh against mercenary unions, I feel some compunction at the thoughts of the numerous class who are in a manner forced by this prejudice into forming them. But there are too many who have no such excuse, and to them the remaining observations are addressed. The sacred nature of the conjugal relation is entirely merged in the worldly aspect of it. That union sacred, indissoluble, fraught with all that earth has to bestow of happiness or misery, is entered upon much of the plan and principle of a partnership account in mercantile affairs—each bringing his or her quantum of worldly possessions—and often with even less inquiry as to moral qualities than persons so situated would make; God's ordinances are not to be so mocked, and such violations of his laws are severely visited upon offenders against them. It would be laughable, if it were not too melancholy, to see beings bound by the holiest ties, who ought to be the sharers in the most sacred duties—united, perhaps, but in one aim, and that to secure from a world which cares not for them, a few atoms more of external observance and attention: to this noble aim sacrificing their own ease and comfort, and the future prospects of those dependent on them. If half the sacrifice thus made to the imperious demands of fashion, (and which is received with the indifference it deserves,) were exerted in a good cause, what benefits might it not produce?

While women are thus content to sacrifice delicacy, affection, principle, to the desire of worldly establishment or aggrandizement, how is the regeneration of society to be expected from them? Formerly, too, this spirit was confined to the old, hackneyed in the ways of the world, and who, having worn out the trifling affections which they ever had, would subject those of their children to the maxims of worldly prudence. This we learn from fiction and the drama, where the worldly wisdom of age is always represented as opposed to the generous but imprudent passions of youth. But now, in these our better and more enlightened days, those mercenary maxims which were odious even in age, are found in the mouths of the young and the fair,—or at least, if not in their mouths, in their actions. To sacrifice affection to interest is a praiseworthy thing. It is fearful to hear the withering sneer with which that folly, love, is spoken of by young and innocent lips—a sneer of conscious superiority, too! It is a superiority not to be envied, and which makes them objects of greater pity than those whom they affect to despise. There is no subject so sacred that it has not a side open to ridicule, and all the most pure and noble attributes of our nature may be converted into subjects for a jest, by minds in which no lofty idea can find an echo. All notions of unworldly and unselfish attachment are branded with the name of romantic follies, unworthy of sensible persons; and the idealities of love, like all other idealities, are fast disappearing beneath the leaden mantle of expediency.

The reform must begin here, as in all great moral questions, with the arbiters of morals—those from whom morals take their tone—women. That we have no right to expect it to begin with the other sex, may be proved even by a vulgar aphorism. It is often triumphantly said, that "a man may marry when he will—a woman must marry when she can." How keen a satire upon both sexes is couched in this homely proverb! and how long will they consent not only patiently to acquiesce in its truth, but to prove it by their actions? That women may be able thus to reform society, it is of importance that conscience be educated on this subject as on every other; educated, too, before the tinsel of false romance deceive the eye, or the frost of worldly-mindedness congeal the heart of youth. It seems to me that this object would best be effected, not by avoiding the subject of love, but by treating it, when it arises, with seriousness and simplicity, as a feeling which the young may one day be called upon to excite and to return, but which can have no existence in the lofty in soul and pure in heart, except when called forth by corresponding qualities in another. Such training as this would be a far more effectual preventive of foolish passions, than cramping the intellect in narrow ignorance, and excluding all knowledge of what life is—in order to prepare people for entering upon it: a plan about as wise in itself, and as successful as to results, as the bolts, bars, and duennas of a Spanish play. Outward, substituted for inward, restraints are sure to act upon man mentally, as actual bonds do physically; he only wants to get free from them. Noble and virtuous principles in the heart will not fail to direct the conduct aright, and it is to transfer these things from matters of decorum or expediency, to matters of conscience, that we should use our most earnest endeavours. Above all, it is incumbent upon those who have the training of the young—of women especially—so to imbue their souls with lofty and conscientious principles of action, that they may be alike unwilling to deceive, or liable to be deceived; that they may not be led as fools or as victims into those responsible relations, for the consequences of which, (how momentous!) to themselves, to others, and to society at large, they are answerable to a God of infinite wisdom and justice.

---

LITERARY CAPABILITIES OF WOMEN.

BY LORD JEFFREY.

Women, we fear, cannot do every thing; nor every thing they attempt. But what they can do, they do, for the most part, excellently—and much more frequently with an absolute and perfect success, than the aspirants of our rougher and ambitious sex. They cannot, we think, represent naturally the fierce and sullen passions of men—nor their coarser vices—nor even scenes of actual business or contention—nor the mixed motives, and strong and faulty characters, by which affairs of moment are usually conducted on the great theatre of the world. For much of this they are disqualified by the delicacy of their training and habits, and the still more disabling delicacy which pervades their conceptions and feelings; and from much they are excluded by their necessary inexperience of the realities they might wish to describe—by their substantial and incurable ignorance of business—of the way in which serious affairs are actually managed—and the true nature of the agents and impulses that give movement and direction to the stronger currents of ordinary life. Perhaps they are also incapable of long moral or political investigations, where many complex and indeterminate elements are to be taken into account, and a variety of opposite probabilities to be weighed before coming to a conclusion. They are generally too impatient to get at the ultimate results, to go well through with such discussions; and either stop short at some imperfect view of the truth, or turn aside to repose in the shade of some plausible error. This, however, we are persuaded, arises entirely from their being seldom set on such tedious tasks. Their proper and natural business is the practical regulation of private life, in all its bearings, affections, and concerns; and the questions with which they have to deal in that most important department, though often of the utmost difficulty and nicety, involve, for the most part, but few elements; and may generally be better described as delicate than intricate;—requiring for their solution rather a quick tact and fine perception, than a patient or laborious examination. For the same reason, they rarely succeed in long works, even on subjects the best suited to their genius; their natural training rendering them equally averse to long doubt and long labour.

For all other intellectual efforts, however, either of the understanding or the fancy, and requiring a thorough knowledge either of man's strength or his weakness, we apprehend them to be, in all respects, as well qualified as their perceptions of grace, propriety, ridicule—their power of detecting artifice, hypocrisy, and affectation—the force and promptitude of their sympathy, and their capacity of noble and devoted attachment, and of the efforts and sacrifices it may require, they are, beyond all doubt, our superiors.

Their business being, as we have said, with actual or social life, and the colours it receives from the conduct and dispositions of individuals, they unconsciously acquire, at a very early age, the finest perception of character and manners, and are almost as soon instinctively schooled in the deep and more dangerous learning of feeling and emotion; while the very minuteness with which they make and meditate on these interesting observations, and the finer shades and variations of sentiment which are thus treasured and recorded, train their whole faculties to a nicety and precision of operation, which often discloses itself to advantage in their application to studies of a different character. When women, accordingly, have turned their minds—as they have done but too seldom—to the exposition or arrangement of any branch of knowledge, they have commonly exhibited, we think, a more beautiful accuracy, and a more uniform and complete justness of thinking, than their less discriminating brethren. There is a finish and completeness, in short, about every thing they put out of their hands, which indicates not only an inherent taste for elegance and neatness, but a habit of nice observation, and singular exactness of judgement.

It has been so little the fashion, at any time, to encourage women to write for publication, that it is more difficult than it should be, to prove these truths by examples. Yet there are enough, within the reach of a very careless and superficial glance over the open field of literature, to enable us to explain, at least, and illustrate, if not entirely to verify, our assertions. No man, we will venture to say, could have written the Letters of Madame de Sevigné, or the Novels of Miss Austin, or the Hymns and Early Lessons of Mrs. Barbauld, or the Conversations of Mrs. Marcet. Those performance, too, are not only essentially and intensely feminine; but they are, in our judgment, decidedly more perfect than any masculine productions with which they can be brought into comparison. They accomplish more completely all the ends at which they aim; and are worked out with a gracefulness and felicity of execution which excludes all idea of failure, and entirely satisfies the expectations they may have raised. We might easily have added to these instances. There are many parts of Miss Edgeworth's earlier stories, and of Miss Mitford's sketches and descriptions, and not a little of Mrs. Opie's, that exhibit the same fine and penetrating spirit of observations, the same softness and delicacy of hand, and unerring truth of delineation, to which we have alluded as characterizing the purer specimens of female art. The same distinguishing traits of woman's spirit are visible through the grief and piety of Lady Russel, and the gayety, the spite, and the venturesomeness of Lady Mary Wortley. We have not as yet much female poetry; but there is a truly feminine tenderness, purity, and elegance in the Psyche of Mrs. Tighe, and in some of the smaller pieces of Lady Craven. On some of the works of Madame de Staël—her Corinne especially—there is a still deeper stamp of the genius of her sex. Her pictures of its boundless devotedness—its depth and capacity of suffering—its high aspirations—its painful irritability, and inextinguishable thirst for emotion, are powerful specimens of that morbid anatomy of the heart, which no hand but that of a woman's was fine enough to have laid open, or skilful enough to have recommended to our sympathy and love. There is the same exquisite and inimitable delicacy, if not the same power, in many of the happier passages of Madame de Souza and Madame Cottin—to say nothing of the more lively and yet melancholy records of Madame de Staël, during her long penance in the court of the Duchesse de Maine.

We think the poetry of Mrs. Hemans a fine exemplification of Female Poetry—and we think it has much of the perfection which we have ventured to ascribe to the happier productions of female genius.

It may not be the best imaginable poetry, and may not indicate the very highest or most commanding genius; but it embraces a great deal of that which gives the very best poetry its chief power of pleasing; and would strike us, perhaps, as more impassioned and exalted, if it were not regulated and harmonized by the most beautiful taste. It is singularly sweet, elegant, and tender—touching, perhaps, and contemplative, rather than vehement and overpowering; and not only finished throughout with an exquisite delicacy, and even severity of execution, but infused with a purity and loftiness of feeling, and a certain sober and humble tone of indulgence and piety, which must satisfy all judgments, and allay the apprehensions of those who are most afraid of the passionate exaggerations of poetry. The diction is always beautiful, harmonious, and free—and the themes, though of great variety, uniformly treated with a grace, originality, and judgment, which mark the same master hand. These themes she has occasionally borrowed, with the peculiar imagery that belongs to them, from the legends of different nations, and the most opposite states of society; and has contrived to retain much of what is interesting and peculiar in each of them, without adopting, along with it, any of the revolting or extravagant excesses which may characterize the taste or manners of the people or the age from which it has been derived. She has transfused into her German or Scandinavian legends the imaginative and daring tone of the originals, without the mystical exaggerations of the one, or the painful fierceness and coarseness of the other—she has preserved the clearness and elegance of the French, without their coldness or affectation—and the tenderness and simplicity of the early Italians, without their diffuseness or languor. Though occasionally expatiating, somewhat fondly and at large, among the sweets of her own planting, there is, on the whole, a great condensation and brevity in most of her pieces, and, almost without exception, a most judicious and vigorous conclusion. The great merit, however, of her poetry, is undoubtedly in its tenderness and its beautiful imagery. The first requires no explanation; but we must be allowed to add a word as to the peculiar charm and character of the latter.

It has always been our opinion, that the very essence of poetry—apart from the pathos, the wit, or the brilliant description which may be imbodied in it, but may exist equally in prose—consists in the fine perception and vivid expression of the subtle and mysterious analogy which exists between the physical and the moral world—which makes outward things and qualities the natural types and emblems of inward gifts and emotions, or leads us to ascribe life and sentiment to every thing that interests us in the aspects of external nature. The feeling of this analogy, obscure and inexplicable as the theory of it may be, is so deep and universal in our nature, that it has stamped itself on the ordinary language of men of every kindred and speech: that to such an extent, that one-half of the epithets by which we familiarly designate moral and physical qualities, are in reality so many metaphors, borrowed reciprocally, upon this analogy, from those opposite forms of expression. The very familiarity, however, of the expression, in these instances, takes away its political effect—and indeed, in substance, its metaphorical character. The original sense of the word is entirely forgotten in the derivative one to which it has succeeded; and it requires some etymological recollection to convince us that it was originally nothing else than a typical or analogical illustration. Thus we talk of a sparkling wit, and a furious blast—a weighty argument, and a gentle stream—without being at all aware that we are speaking in the language of poetry, and transferring qualities from one extremity of the sphere of being to another. In these cases, accordingly, the metaphor, by ceasing to be felt, in reality ceases to exist, and the analogy being no longer intimated, of course can produce no effect. But whenever it is intimated, it does produce an effect; and that effect we think is poetry.

It has substantially two functions, and operates in two directions. In the first place, when material qualities are ascribed to mind, it strikes vividly out, and brings at once before us, the conception of an inward feeling or emotion, which it might otherwise have been difficult to convey, by the presentiment of some bodily form or quality, which is instantly felt to be its true representative, and enables us to fix and comprehend it with a force and clearness not otherwise attainable; and, in the second place, it vivifies dead and inanimate matter with the attributes of living and sentient mind, and fills the whole visible universe around us with objects of interest and sympathy, by tinting them with the hues of life, and associating them with our own passions and affections. This magical operation the poet too performs, for the most part, in one of two ways—either by the direct agency of similies and metaphors, more or less condensed or developed, or by the mere graceful presentment of such visible objects on the scene of his passionate dialogues or adventures, as partake of the character of the emotion he wishes to excite, and thus form an appropriate accompaniment or preparation for its direct indulgence or display. The former of those methods has perhaps been most frequently employed, and certainly has most attracted attention. But the latter, though less obtrusive, and perhaps less frequently resorted to of set purpose, is, we are inclined to think, the most natural and efficacious of the two; and it is often adopted, we believe unconsciously, by poets of the highest order;—the predominant emotion of their minds overflowing spontaneously on all the objects which present themselves to their fancy, and calling out from them, and colouring with their own hues, those that are naturally emblematic of its character, and in accordance with its general expression. It would be easy to show how habitually this is done, by Shakspeare and Milton especially, and how much many of their finest passages are indebted, both for force and richness of effect, to this general and diffusive harmony of the external character of their scenes with the passions of their living agents—this harmonizing and appropriate glow with which they kindle the whole surrounding atmosphere, and bring all that strikes the sense into unison with all the touches the heart.

But it is more to our present purpose to say, that we think the fair writer before us is eminently a mistress of this poetical secret; and, in truth, it was solely for the purpose of illustrating this great charm and excellence in her imagery, that we have ventured upon this little dissertation. Almost all her poems are rich with fine descriptions, and studded over with images of visible beauty. But these are never idle ornaments; all her pomps have a meaning; and her flowers and her gems are arranged, as they are said to be among Eastern lovers, so as to speak the language of truth and of passion. This is peculiarly remarkable in some little pieces, which seem at first sight to be purely descriptive—but are soon found to tell upon the heart, with a deep moral and pathetic impression. But it is, in truth, nearly as conspicuous in the greater part of her productions; where we scarcely meet with any striking sentiment that is not ushered in by some such symphony of external nature—and scarcely a lovely picture that does not serve as an appropriate foreground to some deep or lofty emotion. We may illustrate this proposition, we think, by the following exquisite lines, on a palm-tree in an English garden.

It waved not through an Eastern sky,
Beside a fount of Araby
It was not fanned by southern breeze
In some green isle of Indian seas,
Nor did its graceful shadows sleep
O'er stream of Africa, lone and deep.

But far the exiled Palm-tree grew
Midst foliage of no kindred hue;
Through the laburnum's dropping gold
Rose the light shaft of orient mould,
And Europe's violets, faintly sweet,
Purpled the moss-beds at his feet.

There came an eve of festal hours—
Rich music filled that garden's bowers:
Lamps, that from flowering branches hung,
On sparks of dew soft colours flung,
And bright forms glanced—a fairy show—
Under the blossoms, to and fro.

But one, a lone one, midst the throng,
Seemed reckless all of dance or song:
He was a youth of dusky mien,
Whereon the Indian sun had been—
Of crested brow, and long black hair—
A stranger, like the Palm-tree, there!

And slowly, sadly moved his plumes,
Glittering athwart the leafy glooms:
He passed the pale green olives by,
Nor won the chestnut-flowers his eye;
But, when to that sole Palm he came,
Then shot a rapture through his frame!

To him, to him its rustling spoke:
The silence of his soul it broke!
It whispered of his own bright isle,
That lit the ocean with a smile;
Ay, to his ear that native tone
Had something of the sea-wave's moan!

His mother's cabin home, that lay
Where feathery cocoas fringed the bay;
The dashing of his brethren's oar;
The conch-note heard along the shore;—
All through his wakening bosom swept;
He clasped his country's Tree—and wept!

Oh! scorn him not! The strength whereby
The patriot girds himself to die,
The unconquerable power, which fills
The freeman battling on his hills—
These have one fountain deep and clear—
The same whence gushed that child-like tear!

---

ENNUI, AND THE DESIRE TO BE FASHIONABLE.

BY LORD JEFFREY.

There are two great sources of unhappiness to those whom fortune and nature seem to have placed above the reach of ordinary miseries. The one is ennui—that stagnation of life and feeling which results from the absence of all motives to exertion; and by which the justice of Providence has so fully compensated the partiality of fortune, that it may be fairly doubted whether, upon the whole, the race of beggars is not happier than the race of lords; and whether those vulgar wants that are sometimes so importunate, are not, in this world, the chief ministers of enjoyment. This is a plague that infects all indolent persons who can live on in the rank in which they were born, without the necessity of working; but, in a free country, it rarely occurs in any great degree of virulence, except among those who are already at the summit of human felicity. Below this, there is room for ambition, and envy, and emulation, and all the feverish movements of aspiring vanity and unresting selfishness, which act as prophylactics against this more dark and deadly distemper. It is the canker which corrodes the full-blown flower of human felicity—the pestilence which smites at the bright hour of noon.

The other curse of the happy, has a range more wide and indiscriminate. It, too, tortures only the comparatively rich and fortunate; but is most active among the least distinguished; and abates in malignity as we ascend to the lofty regions of pure ennui. This is the desire of being fashionable;—the restless and insatiable passion to pass for creatures a little more distinguished than we really are—with the mortification of frequent failure, and the humiliating consciousness of being perpetually exposed to it. Among those who are secure of "meat, clothes, and fire," and are thus above the chief physical evils of existence, we do believe that this is a more prolific source of unhappiness, than guilt, disease, or wounded affection; and that more positive misery is created, and more true enjoyment excluded, by the eternal fretting and straining of this pitiful ambition, than by all the ravages of passion, the desolations of war, or the accidents or mortality. This may appear a strong statement; but we make it deliberately; and are deeply convinced of its truth. The wretchedness which it produces may not be so intense; but it is of much longer duration, and spreads over a far wider circle. It is quite dreadful, indeed, to think what a sweep of this pest has taken among the comforts or our prosperous population. To be though fashionable—that is, to be thought more opulent and tasteful, and on a footing of intimacy with a greater number of distinguished persons than they really are, is the great and laborious pursuit of four families out of five, the members of which are exempted from the necessity of daily industry. In this pursuit, their time, spirits, and talents are wasted; their tempers soured; their affections palsied; and their natural manners and dispositions altogether sophisticated and lost.

These are the great twin scourges of the prosperous: But there are other maladies, of no slight malignity, to which they are peculiarly liable. One of these, arising mainly from want of more worthy occupation, is that perpetual use of stratagem and contrivance—that little, artful diplomacy of private life, by which the simplest and most natural transactions are rendered complicated and difficult, and the common business of existence made to depend on the success of plots and counterplots. By the incessant practice of this petty policy, a habit of duplicity and anxiety is infallibly generated, which is equally fatal to integrity and enjoyment. We gradually come to look on others with the distrust which we are conscious of deserving; and are insensibly formed to sentiments of the most unamiable selfishness and suspicion. It is needless to say, that all these elaborate artifices are worse than useless to the person who employs them; and that the ingenious plotter is almost always baffled and exposed by the downright honesty of some undesigning competitor. Miss Edgeworth, in her tale of "Man[oe]uvring," has given a very complete and most entertaining representation of "the by-paths and indirect crooked ways," by which these artful and inefficient people generally make their way to disappointment. In the tale, entitled "Madame de Fleury," she has given some useful examples of the ways in which the rich may most effectually do good to the poor—an operation which, we really believe, fails more frequently from want of skill than of inclination: And, in "The Dun," she has drawn a touching and most impressive picture of the wretchedness which the poor so frequently suffer, from the unfeeling thoughtlessness which withholds from them the scanty earnings of their labour.

---

THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONAL CHARACTER.

The immense importance of personal character is a subject which does not enough draw the attention of individuals or society, yet it is to the power of gaining influence, what the root is to the tree,—the soul to the body. It is doubtful if any of us can be acquainted with the infinitely minute ramifications into which this all-pervading influence extends. A slight survey of society will enable us, in some degree, to judge of it. There are individuals who, by the sole force of personal character, seem to render wise, better, more elevated, all with whom they come in contact. Others, again, stand in the midst of the society in which they are placed, a moral upas, poisoning the atmosphere around them, so that no virtue can come within their shadow and live. Family virtues descend with family estates, and hereditary vices are hardly compensated for by hereditary possessions. The characters of the junior members of a family are often only reflections or modifications of those of the elder. Families retain for generations peculiarities of temper and character. The Catos were all stern, upright, inflexible; the Guises proud and haughty at the heart, though irresistibly popular and fascinating in manner. We see the influence which men, exalted and powerful, exert on their age, and on society; it is difficult to believe that a similar influence is exerted by every individual man and woman, however limited his or her sphere of life: the force of the torrent is easily calculated,—that of the under-current is hidden, yet its existence and power are no less actual.

This truth opens to the conscientious a field of duty not enough cultivated. The improvement of individual character has been too much regarded as a matter of personal concern, a duty to ourselves,—to our immediate relations perhaps, but to no others,—a matter affecting out individual happiness here, and our individual safety hereafter! This is taking a very narrow view of a very extended subject. The work of individual self-formation is a duty, not only to ourselves and our families, but to our fellow-creatures at large; it is the best and most certainly beneficial exercise of philanthropy. It is not, it is true, very flattering to self-love to be told, that instead of mending the world, (the mania of the present day,) the best service which we can do that world is to mend ourselves. "If each mends one, all will be mended," says the old English adage, with the deep wisdom of those popular sayings,—a wisdom amply corroborated by the unsettled principles and defective practice of too many of the self-elected reformers of society.

It is peculiarly desirable, at this particular juncture of time, that this subject be insisted upon. Man, naturally a social and gregarious animal, becomes every day more so. The vast undertakings, the mighty movements of the present day, which can only be carried into operation by the combined energy of many wills, tend to destroy individuality of thought and action, and the consciousness of individual responsibility. The dramatist complains of this fact, as it affects his art, the representation of surface,—the moralist has greater cause to complain of it, as affecting the foundation of character. If it be true that we must not follow a multitude to do evil, it is equally true that we must not follow a multitude even to do good, if it involve the neglect of our own peculiar duties. Our first, most peremptory, and most urgent duty, is, the improvement of our own character; so that public beneficence may not be neutralized by private selfishness,—public energy by private remissness,—that the applause of the world may not be bought at the expense of private and domestic wretchedness. So frequent and so lamentable are the proofs of human weakness in this respect, that we are sometimes tempted to believe the opinion of the cold and sneering skeptic,[112] that the two ruling passions of men are the love of pleasure and the love of action; and that all their seemingly good deeds proceed from these principles. It is not so: it is a libel on human nature: men,—even erring men,—have better motives, and higher aims: but they mistake the nature of their duties and invert their order; what should be "first is last, and the last first."

It may be wisely urged, that if men waited for the perfecting of individual character, before they joined their fellow men in those great undertakings which are to insure benefit to the race, nothing would ever be accomplished, and society would languish in a state of passive inertness. It is far from necessarily following that attention to private should interfere with attention to public interests; and public interests are more advanced or retarded than it is possible to believe, by the personal characters of their agitators. It is difficult to get the worldly and the selfish to see this, but it is, nevertheless, true; and there is no wisdom, political or moral, in the phrase, "Measures, not men." Measures, wise and just in themselves, are received with distrust and suspicion, because the characters of their originators are liable to distrust and suspicion. Lord Chesterfield, the great master of deception, was forced to pay truth the compliment of declaring, that "the most successful diplomatist would be a man perfectly honest and upright, who should, at all times, and in all circumstances, say the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." So the rulers of nations ought to be perfectly honest and upright; not because such men would be free from error, but because the faith of the governed in their honour would obviate the consequences of many errors. It is the want of unselfishness and truth on the part of rulers, and the consequent want of faith in the ruled, that has reduced the politics of nations to a complicated science. If we could once get men to act out the gospel precept, "Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you," nations might burn their codes, and lawyers their statute-books. These are the hundred cords with which the Lilliputians bound Gulliver, and he escaped. If they had possessed it, or could have managed it, one cable would have been worth them all. Much has been said,—much written,—on the art of governing. Why has the simple truth been overlooked or suppressed, that the moral character of the rulers of nations is of first-rate importance? Except the Lord build the city, vain is the labour of them who build it; except religion and virtue guide the state, vain are the talents and the acts of legislators. Is it possible that motives of paltry personal advancement, or of pecuniary gain, can induce men to assume responsibilities affecting the welfare of millions? The voice of those millions replies in the affirmative, and their reproachful glances turn on you, mothers of our legislators! It might have been yours, to stamp on their infant minds the dispassionate and unselfish devotedness which belongs to your own sex,—the scorn of meanness; the contempt of self, in comparison with others, peculiar to woman. How have you fulfilled your lofty mission? Charity itself can only allow us to suppose that its existence is as unknown as its spirit.

The important fact, then, of the great influence of personal character, can never be too much impressed upon all; but it is peculiarly needful that women be impressed with it, because their personal character must necessarily influence that of their children, and be the source of their personal character. For, if the active performance of the duties of a citizen interfere, and it undoubtedly does so, with the duty of self-education, of what importance is it that men enter upon them with such a personal character as may insure us confidence while it secures us from temptation? The formation of such a character depends mainly on mothers, and especially on their personal character and principles. The character of the mother influences the children more than that of the father, because it is more exposed to their daily, hourly observation. It is difficult for these young, though acute observers, to comprehend the principles which regulate their father's political opinions; his vote in the senate; his conduct in political or commercial relations; but they can see,—yes! and they can estimate and imitate, the moral principles of the mother in her management of themselves, her treatment of her domestics, and the thousand petty details of the interior. These principles, whether lax or strict, low or high in moral tone, become, by an insensible and imperceptible adoption, their principles, and are carried out by them into the duties and avocations of future life. It would be startling to many to know with what intelligence and accuracy motives are penetrated, inconsistencies remarked, and treasured up with retributive or imitative projects, as may best suit the purpose of the moment. Nothing but a more extensive knowledge of children than is usually possessed on entering life, can awaken parents to the perception of this truth; and awakened perception may, perhaps, be only awakened misery. How important is it, then, that every thing in the education of women should tend to enlighten conscience, that she may enter on her arduous task with principles requiring only watchfulness, not reformation; and such a personal character as may exercise none by healthy influences on her children!

---

ON THE MEANS OF SECURING PERSONAL INFLUENCE.

The qualities which seem more especially needful in a character which is to influence others, are, consistency, simplicity, and benevolence, or love.

By consistency of character, I mean consistency of action with principle, of manner with thought, of self with self. The want of this quality is a failing with which our sex is often charged, and justly; but are we to blame? Our hearts are warm, our nerves irritable, and we have seen how little there is, in existing systems of female education, calculated to give wide, lofty, self-devoted principles of action. Without such principles, there can be no consistency of conduct; and without consistency of conduct, there can be no available moral influence.

The peculiar evil arising from want of consistency, is the want of trust or faith which it engenders. This is felt in the common intercourse with the world. In our relations with inconsistent persons, we are like mariners at sea without a compass. On the other hand, intercourse with consistent persons gives to the mind a sort of tranquillity, peculiarly favourable to happiness and to virtue. It is like the effect produced by the perception of an immutable truth, which, from the very force of contrast, is peculiarly grateful to the inhabitants of so changeable a world as this. It is moral repose.

This sort of moral repose is most peculiarly advantageous to children, because it allows ample scope for the development of their mental and moral faculties; banishing from their minds all that chaotic bewilderment into which dependence on inconsistent persons throws them. It is advantageous to them in another, and more important way,—it prepares them for a belief in virtue; a trust in others, which it is easy to train up into a veneration for the source of all virtue; a trust in the origin of all truth. There can be no clearness of moral perception in the governed, where there is no manifestation of a moral rule of right in the governor. In speaking of moral perception, I do not mean to say that children have, properly speaking, a moral perception of inconsistency; but it affects their comfort and well-being, nevertheless. There is, in the nature of man, as great a perception of moral, as of physical order and proportion; and the absence of the moral produces pain and disgust to the soul, as the absence of the physical does to the senses. This state of pain and disgust is felt, though it can never be expressed, by children, who are under the management of inconsistent persons,—that is, persons whose conduct is guided solely by feeling, (good or bad,) by caprice, or impulse; and how injurious it is to them, we may easily conceive. If, however, their present comfort only were endangered by it, the evil would be of comparatively small magnitude; but it affects their character for life. They cease to trust, and they cease to venerate; now, trust is the root of faith, and veneration of piety:—and when the root is destroyed, how can the plant flourish? Perhaps we may remark that the effect here produced upon children is the same as that which long intercourse with the world produces in men: only that the effect differs in proportion to their differing intellectual faculties. The child is annoyed, and knows not the cause of annoyance; the man is annoyed, and endeavours to lose the sense of discomfort in a universal skepticism as to human virtue, and a resolving of all actions into one principle, self-interest. He thus seeks to create a principle possessing the stability which he desires, but seeks in vain to find; for, be it remembered, our love of moral stability is precisely as great as our love of physical change;—another of the mysteries of our being. The effects on the man are the same as on the child,—he ceases to believe, and he ceases to venerate; and the end is the most degrading of all conditions,—the abnegation of all abstract virtue, generosity, or love. Now, into this state children are brought by the inconsistency of parents,—that is, these young and innocent creatures are placed in a condition, moral and intellectual, which we consider an evil, even when produced by long contact with a selfish and unkind world. And thus they enter upon life, prepared for vice in all its forms,—and skepticism, in all its heart-withering tendencies. How can parents bear this responsibility? There is something so touching in the simple faith of childhood,—its utter dependence,—its willingness to believe in the perfection of those to whom it looks for protection—that to betray that faith, to shake that dependence, seems almost akin to irreligion.

The value of principle, then, in itself so precious, is enhanced tenfold by constancy in its manifestations, and therefore consistency, as a source of influence, can never be too much insisted upon.

Consistency of principle is brought to the test in every daily, hourly occurrence of woman's life, and if she have been brought up without an abiding sense of duty and responsibility, she is of all beings most unfortunate; influences the most potent are committed to her care, and from her they issue like the simoom of the desert, breathing moral blight and death. I have endeavoured, in some degree, to enforce the power of indirect influences on the minds of children: they are very powerful in the other relations of life; in the conjugal, the truth is too well known and attested by tale and song to need additional corroboration here—and this book is principally, though not wholly, dedicated to woman in her maternal character.

The extreme importance of the manifestation of consistency in mothers may be argued from this fact, that it is of infinite importance to children to see the daily operation of an immutable and consistent rule of right, in matters sufficiently small to come within the sphere of childish observation, and, therefore, if called upon to give a definition of the peculiar mission of woman, and the peculiar source of her influence, I should say it is the application of large principles to small duties,—the agency of comprehensive intelligence on details. That largeness of mental vision, which, while it can comprehend the vast, is too keen to overlook the little, is especially to be cultivated by women. It is a great mistake to suppose the two qualities are incompatible; and the supposition that they are so, has done much mischief; the error arises not from the extent, but from the narrowness of our capacity, To aspire is our privilege, and a privilege which we are by no means slack to use, without considering that the operations of infinitude are even more incomprehensible in their minuteness than in their magnitude, and that, therefore, to be always looking from the minute towards the vast, is only a proof of the finite nature of our present capacity. The loftiest intellect may, without abasement, be employed on the minutest domestic detail, and in all probability will perform it better than an inferior one: it is the motive and end of an action which makes it either dignified or mean. In the homely words of old Herbert

All may of thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which, with this tincture, for thy sake
Will not grow bright and clean.

It is then in the minutiæ of daily life and conduct that this consistency has its most beneficial operation, and it must derive its power from the personal character for this reason, that no virtues but indigenous ones are capable of the sort of moral transfusion here mentioned. It is rare to see a parent, eminently distinguished by any moral virtue, unsuccessful in the transmitting that virtue to children, simply because, being an integral part of character, it is consistent in its mode of operation; so virtues originating in effort, or practised for the sake of example, are seldom transferable; the same consistency cannot be expected in the exercise of them, and this may explain the small success of pattern mothers, par excellence so called, and whose good intentions and sacrifices ought not to be objects of derision; the very appearance of effort mars the effect of all effort.

The world is sometimes surprised to see extraordinary proofs of moral influence exercised by persons who never planned, never aimed, to obtain such influence,—nay, whose conduct is never regulated by any fixed aim for its attainment; the fact is, that those characters are composed of truth and love;—truth, which prevents the assumption even of virtues which are not natural, thereby adding to the influence of such as are; love, the most contagious of all moral contagions, the regenerating principle of the world!

The virtue which mainly contributes to the support of consistency—without which, in fact, consistency cannot exist—is simplicity: consistency of conduct can never be maintained by characters in any degree double or sophisticated, for it is not of simplicity as opposed to craft, but of simplicity as opposed to sophistication, that I would here speak, and rather as the Christian virtue, single-mindedness; the desire to be, opposed to the wish to appear. We have seen how rarely influence can be gained where no faith can be yielded; now an unsimple character can never inspire faith or trust. People do not always analyze mental phenomena sufficiently to know the reason of this fact, but no one will dispute the fact itself. It is true there are persons who have the power of conciliating confidence of which they are unworthy, but it is only because (like Castruccio Castrucciani) they are such exquisite dissemblers, that their affection of simplicity has temporarily the effect of simplicity itself. This power of successful assumption is, fortunately, confined to very few, and the pretenders to unreal virtues and the utterer of assumed sentiments are only ill-paid labourers, working hard to reap no harvest-fruits.

An objection slightly advanced before, may here naturally occur again, and may be answered more fully, viz. the opposition of the conventional forms of society to entire simplicity of thought and action, and consequently to influence. The influence which conventionalism has over principle is to be utterly disclaimed, but its having an injurious influence over manner is far more easily obviated; so easily, indeed, that it may be doubted whether there be not more simplicity in compliance than in opposition. Originality, either of thought or behaviour, is most uncommon, and only found in minds above, or in minds below, the ordinary standard; neither is this peculiar feature of society in itself a blame-worthy one: it arises out of the constitution of man, naturally imitative, gregarious, and desirous of approbation. Nothing would be gained by the abolition of these forms, for they are representatives of a good spirit; the spirit, it is true, is too often not there, but it would be better to call it back than to abolish the form. We have an opportunity of judging how far it would be convenient or agreeable to do so, in the conduct of some soi-disant contemners of forms; we perceive that such contempt is equally the offspring of selfishness with slavish regard: it is only the exchange of the selfishness of vanity for the selfishness of indolence and pride, and the world is the loser by the exchange. Hypocrisy has been said to be the homage which vice pays to virtue. Conventional forms may, with justice, be called the homage which selfishness pays to benevolence.

How then is simplicity of character to be preserved without violating conventionalism, to which it seems so much at variance, and yet, which it ought not to oppose? By the cultivation of that spirit of which conventional forms are only the symbol, by training children in the early exercise of the kind the benevolent affections, and by exacting in the domestic circle all those observances which are the signs of good-will in society, so that they may be the emanations of a benevolent heart, instead of the gloss of artificial politeness. Conventionalism will never injure the simplicity of such characters as these, nay, it may greatly add to their influence, and secure for their virtues and talents the reception that they deserve; it is a part of benevolence to cultivate the graces that may persuade or allure men to the imitation of what is right. "Stand off, I am holier than thou," is not more foreign to true piety, than "Stand off, I am wiser than thou," is to true benevolence, as relates to those "things indifferent," in which we are told that we may be all things to all men.

The cultivation of domestic politeness is a subject not nearly enough attended to, yet it is the sign, and ought to be the manifestation, of many beautiful virtues—affection, self-denial, elegance, are all called into play by it; and it has a potent recommendation in its being an excellent preservative against affectation, which generally arises from a great desire to please, joined to an ignorance of the means of pleasing successfully. It is to be hoped that these remarks will not be deemed trifling or irrelevant in a chapter on the means of securing personal influence. Powers of pleasing are a very great source of that influence, and there is no telling how great might be the benefit to society, if all on whom they are bestowed (and how lavishly they are bestowed on woman!) would be persuaded to use them, not as a means of selfish gratification, but as an engine for the promotion of good.[113] Such powers are as sacred a trust from the Creator as any other gift, and ought to be equally used for his glory and the advancement of moral good. Virtue, indeed, in itself is venerable, but it must be attractive in order to be influential. And how attractive it might be, if the powers of pleasing, which can cover and even recommend the deformity of vice, were conscientiously excited in its behalf! This is the peculiar province of women, and they are peculiarly fitted for it by Nature. Their personal loveliness, their versatile powers, and lively fancy, qualify them in an eminent degree to adorn, and by adorning to recommend, virtue and religion.

Cosi all' egro fanciul porgiamo aspersi
Di soare licor gli orli del vaso.