authoress said that all his lordship wanted to do was to put women on one side, and say to his wife, "There, just kiss me and be quiet." In those days women were as they are at present-in a much less degree-too much excluded from a participation in the cares and business of their husbands. The true way to render the weaker vessel much stronger is to let her know what you are doing, and to let her take an interest in, and have some knowledge of, your affairs. There can be few things more cruel in the world than that mistaken kindness which deprives a person of the use of his eyes or limbs; yet some of our petted wives are treated like this. They know really nothing of their husbands' affairs; they are petted till they become extravagant and weak; they are indulged till they are rendered petulant and overbearing; they are shielded from the world till they grow as delicate as a hothouse plant. And to many such, alas ! comes the crash; the husband dies, and the wife is left a prey to that sordid crew who live upon the widow and the orphan.

Like the author of the Vicar of Wakefield, the present writer has very little sympathy with "petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines, or virago queens;" and we think that she who makes her husband happy and pure-minded, and her children good, is a practical philosopher, worth a dozen theoretical ones, and much higher in men's esteem than those romantic ladies who kill with a glance, charm with a smile, and excite a hopeless passion in a dozen hearts merely by warbling a song. But we think that a man should trust his wife further than Harry Percy, and as much as the noble Brutus did. He will find his best account in it. Here and there a man may marry a she-fool-a female nonentity-who

is called a wife, yet is no wife to him; but men in general gain by making the weaker vessel not their master, but their equal, their second self and friend. "A man," said the wise Simonides, "cannot have anything that is better than a good woman ;" and his Greek mind balancing and weighing the matter, he is careful to add, "nor anything worse than a bad one."

B

ID we receive and listen to all the good that men

have written upon woman, we should believe that there were no bad women in the world. If

we were to believe all the evil that men, as well

as her own sex, have said of her, we should become misogamists-woman-haters-and live, as many a poor fellow has done, out of sight of a petticoat, and ready to rave when one came in sight. Men, as we shall see, taking up the part of the Avvocato del Diavolo, have said some smart things against woman, but from her own sex we hear worse things. "A fox," exclaimed a Spanish lady, "is very cunning, but a woman is much more cunning than a fox." "Good wives," cried another, quoting Montaigne, with a difference,* "are to be counted by the dozen only; for women notably fail in the duties of marriage." "In general I have observed,"

* What Montaigne says is that good women are not to be found in dozens, or, as Cotton quaintly translates it, "don't run thirteen to the dozen."-Essay on Three Good Women.

wrote Livy, and his observation is as true to-day as it was when it was made, " that women are more gentle and pleasing in public than in their own homes." “Do you wish," said Madame Neckar, "to make your opinion prevail? If so, address yourselves to the women." But why? It will be well that the reader should mark this reason given by a very clever and observant woman. "They will receive it easily because they are ignorant; they will spread it rapidly because they love to gossip and talk; they will retain it a long time because they are headstrong and obstinate."

Fable and history, sacred and profane, have ungraciously carried to the account of women most of the evils which afflict mankind. Let us count our afflictresses: we have Eve, Delilah, Pandora, Dejanira, Helen, the daughters of Pandarus, Messalina, the Empress of Russia, and several queens and empresses whom we need not mention. The epigrammatists have taken hold of early history or legend to become very severe on woman; none more smartly so than in this one from the French, which I translate—

"Waking in Eden, Adam quick descried,

By his side sleeping, what was once his side-
Flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, so close :—
And his first sleep became his last repose."

It may not aid us much, as moderns, to recount what "wise Terence, witty Plautus, tart Aristophanes" have to say against woman; but Plautus does so abound with passages abusive of the sex, that his comedies are a storehouse whence a woman-hater may at leisure draw into the field an amount of abuse against her which would be more amusing

if it were not so true; just as the exaggeration of Falstaff's lies saves them from being degradingly painful to the listener or reader. Let us resort to him on the article of dress.

Good looks are important to woman. Man can afford to be ugly; he has that privilege-a privilege which some men often, as a witty Frenchwoman said, "abuse prodigiously;" but an ulgy woman is really to be pitied. Hence, from this necessity, it is natural that she should heighten any charms which she may possess. Her dress, according to our conventional society, conceals all except her face. This is cruel to her, for, speaking as an artist, the bust, as ladies admit themselves, when they appear in full dress, is not less beautiful to behold. Indeed, Lady Montagu went so far as to say, after she had been admitted to the seraglio of the Grand Turk, that, were women allowed to show more of their forms, the face would be thought little of. Nor is this suggestion at all immodest; in fact, the very deepest thinkers among us believe that dress gives an opportunity for immodesty by creating a factitious modesty. Thus the Egyptian women, who cover their noses, mouths, foreheads, and all but their eyes, deem it the grossest rudeness to exhibit their faces; and in England a Turk on his travels told us that for months he could not divest himself of the notion that all the Western European women were very bold, not because of their deportment, but because they had bare faces.

Perhaps at no period was woman more gracefully dressed than at present, unless it was when Vandyke painted her; but she costs a good deal. She had not half the things to