be wisely good; it is hard to believe faithfully; it is hard to produce anything beautiful, lasting, and true. It will not do to rush like a bull at a gate, to cast money broadcast, to expend one's own energy in the effort, and to die in despair at the sad result. What we must endeavour to do is, to work well, pray well, and in all things act with caution when we set about that pious, necessary, but really hard work of Doing Good.

POWER.

LADY author, who is more than an author for ladies, and who has real thought and weight about her which is more than her class has generally—has hit upon the common passion of her sex-of woman generally. And what is this common passion? Is it love? No, it is not love. Women make a great fuss about this passion, and talk and write of it-to men. To their own sex they have the good sense not to parade it too much. Half the women fall in love for fashion's sake; another quarter of the moiety do not care about love at all, do not even understand it, and, if they marry, are good friends and partners of the man they chose, chaste and proper wives, no doubt, but with about as much love in their composition as there is Hebrew in their heads. A half of the other quarter would love if they could; and the eighth— well, of that one half-say one sixteenth of the whole-do perhaps know how to feel a genuine soul-stirring passion, beautiful, ennobling, pure, the passion which we all of us dream of and so few meet with.

Is it, then, if not love, dress, finery, vanity in fact?

*K

Scarcely that. Women are forced to be more vain than men; they are more talked about, are urged continually to be vain, and some of them adopt the fashion. To a certain extent they are quite right in doing so. A woman who is careless of her person and untidy in her dress, destitute of the fresh promptings of vanity, would stand a poor chance. The sex are beautiful because they feel and know that beauty, an unadorned, unconscious beauty, is not what man prizes. There are careless, slatternly girls, as there are boys; and, just as there are men, there are awkward, ungainly, untidy women. It is not vanity, or dress, or show that a woman prizes : it is something much more substantial than all these. It is power. "On looking back on this childish passion," says the writer (Miss Edwards), “ I believe that it was most of all the power of the man that attracted me. He was altogether older and plainer than I pictured him; and yet that sense of power pleased me better than youth or beauty. It was power of every kind—of health, and courage, and daring of the mind and the will-of freedom and fortune."

Yes, it is power of every kind that women love, wealth or strength. The poor woman who marries some poor man either for a home or for love is all the better pleased with him if he has some weight in his little circle; and if he has not, she fondly creates for him some ideal weight which the poor man has not, with which she supplements its want. Thus, in a farce, in which it is evident that the writer has observed more than ordinary farce-writers, a girl marries a man whose only quality is that he is " so strong" that she believes no one can equal him; power is what she worships. Captain Marryat also, one of our best naval novelists, tells in

Jacob Faithful of a little pretty waterside girl who married a young waterman, of whom she was desperately fond, principally for the reason that he could thrash at fisticuffs any other young waterman on the river. She would receive him, after he had had a fight, with a smile of love and triumph, and wipe his bruised face, and patch his torn shirt for him, with a sense of the most exquisite pleasure, just as Cleopatra would have received her Antony when he came back victorious from battle. And Mr. Thackeray, a much more acute observer, makes Becky Sharp love and admire her husband once, and once only; and that is when he administers a hearty beating to Lord Steyne. "You lie, you dog!' said Rawdon ; 'you lie, you coward and villain!' And he struck the peer twice over the face with his open hand, and flung him bleeding to the ground. It was all done before Rebecca could interpose. She stood there, trembling before him. She admired her husband, strong, brave, and victorious."

The writer quotes good novelists, because they, above all, have the strongest faculty for acute observation of the workings of the human mind; or, if they have it not, they are worthless. A mere narrative in a novel, if it does not involve delineation of character, is little better than newspaper-reporting. Yes, women love power. When a woman novelist draws a heroine, or when a girl dreams of her hero love, she paints him 'strong, brave, and victorious." After the battle of Waterloo, a dandy of the time writes, there was no chance for the black-coats the red-coats had it all their own way. Every fortune was snapped up by the military; and the newspapers were full of advertisements of marriages of the beautiful Miss

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So-and-So with Captain, Colonel, or Lieutenant This or That. Men love power too, but hardly in that excess which women do. With a man, power means a great deal. It means, as we have seen, success in love; for some women love two or three young fellows equally well; and the boldest and most active seizes the happy moment and marries her. After that, it means honour, place, obedience, a happy home, and an obedient family; it means that everybody will not pull your nose nor tread on your favourite corns; it means a wellordered family, and success in life. Milton's Devil-a splendid embodiment of power, for which the world is not yet sufficiently grateful to our greatest epic poet-knew very well what he was about when he said to Beelzebub, who had counselled prudence and submission

"Fallen cherub! to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering ;"

and, indeed, miserable it is. It is when we are strong and in health that we bear pain; shocks and hurts pass us by unnoticed; but let us be weak-let our body be reduced by sickness, our spirit by constant disappointment—and we suffer. Every day makes us worse-every attack tells upon us. We become as sensitive as a shell-less crab, and a prey to every enemy; our very nerves rebel; the opening and the shutting of a door will terrify and shake us; and we fully realize the assertion that to be weak is miserable. Mental weakness is equally pitiable—perhaps more so. A vacillating policy in a government, and a want of determination and will in a man, are equally harmful. The government in that case becomes despicable. It is also the peculiar misfortune of