she will assuredly avenge herself. If you do not get wheat out of your piece of ground, she will abundantly give you tares. And there can be no other rule expressly invented for the benefit of fashionable young women. Their moral nature, if nobody ever taught them to keep an eager eye upon it, is soon overgrown, either with flaunting poison plants, or at best with dull gray moss. The parent dreams that the daughter's mind is all swept and garnished. Lo, there are seven or any other number of devils that have entered in and taken possession, more or less permanently. The human creature who has never been taught to take an interest in what is right and wholesome will, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, take an interest in what is wrong and unwholesome. You cannot keep minds in a state of vacuum. A girl, like anybody else, will obey the bent of the character which has been given either by the education of design or the more usual education of mere accidental experience. Everything depends, in the ordinary course of things, upon the general view of the aims and objects of life which you succeed, deliberately or by hazard, in creating.

A girl is not taught that marriage has grave, moral and rational purposes, itself being no more than a means. On the contrary, it is always figured in her eyes as an end, and as an end scarcely at all connected with a moral and rational companionship. It is, she fancies, the gate to some sort of paradise whose mysterious joys are not to be analysed. She forgets that there are no such swift-coming spontaneous paradises in this world, where the future can never be anything more than the child of the present, indelibly stamped with every feature and line of its parent. This castle-building, however, is harmless. If it does not strengthen, still it does not absolutely impoverish or corrupt, characters. Of some castle-building one cannot say so much. Character is assuredly corrupted by avaricious dreams of marriage as a road to material opulence and luxury. There is, indeed, no end to the depraved broodings which may come to an empty and undirected mind. If the emotions and the intellect are not tended and trained, they will run to an evil and evil-propagating seed. Rooted and incurable frivolty is the best that can come of it; corruption is the worst.

People madly suppose that going to church, or giving an occasional blanket to a sick old woman, will suffice to implant a worthy conception of the aims of life. At this moment, some mothers are, perhaps, believing that the dull virtue of the country will in a few days redress the balance which had been too much discomposed by the rush and whirl of the town. As if one strong set of silly interests and emotions could be effaced at will by simple change of scene, without substitution of new interests and emotions. Excess of frivolous excitement is not repaired or undone by excess of mere blankness and nothingness. The dreariness of the virtue of the villeggiatura is as noxious as the whirl of the mercenary and little virtuous period of the season. Teach young women from their childhood upwards that marriage is their single career, and it is inevitable that they should look upon every hour which is not spent in promoting this sublime end and aim as so much subtracted from life. Penetrated with unwholesome excitement in one part of their existence, they are penetrated with killing ennui in the next.

If mothers would only add to their account of marriage as the end of a woman's existence—which may be right or it may not—a definition of marriage as an association with a reasonable and reflective being, they would speedily effect a revolution in the present miserable system. To the business of finding a husband a young lady would then add the not less important business of making herself a rational person, instead of a more or less tastefully decorated doll with a passion for a great deal of money. She might awaken to the fact, which would at first startle her very much no doubt, that there is a great portion of a universe outside her own circle and her own mind. This simple discovery would of itself effect a revolution that might transform her from being an insipid idiot into a tolerably rational being. As it is, the universe to her is only a collection of rich bachelors in search of wives, and of odious rivals who are contending with her for one or more of these too wary prizes. All high social aims, fine broad humanizing ways of surveying life, are unknown to her, or else appear in her eyes as the worship of Mumbo Jumbo appears in the eyes of the philosopher. She thinks of nothing except her private affairs. She is indifferent to politics, to literature—in a word, to anything that requires thought. She reads novels of a kind, because novels are all about love, and love had once something to do with marriage, her own peculiar and absorbing business. Beyond this her mind does not stir. Any more positively gross state one cannot imagine. There are women who are by accident more degraded physically. Mutatis mutandis, there are none more degraded, morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however silly, and however evil, who can make a settlement.

LITTLE WOMEN.

The conventional idea of a brave, an energetic, or a supremely criminal woman is a tall, dark-haired, large-armed virago, who might pass as the younger brother of her husband, and about whom nature seemed to have hesitated before determining whether to make her a man or a woman—a kind of debatable land, in fact, between the two sexes, and almost as much one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady Macbeth, Catharine de' Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned murderesses in novels, are all of the muscular, black-brigand type, with more or less of regal grace superadded according to circumstances; and it would be thought nothing but a puerile fancy to suppose the contrary of those whose personal description is not already known. Crime, indeed, especially in art and fiction, has generally been painted in very nice proportion to the number of cubic inches embodied, and the depth of color employed; though we are bound to add that the public favor runs towards muscular heroines almost as much as towards muscular murderesses, which to a certain extent redresses the overweighted balance.

Our later novelists, however, have altered the whole setting of the palette. Instead of five foot ten of black and brown, they have gone in for four foot nothing of pink and yellow; instead of tumbled masses of raven hair, they have shining coils of purest gold; instead of hollow caverns whence flash unfathomable eyes eloquent of every damnable passion, they have limpid lakes of heavenly blue; and their worst sinners are in all respects fashioned as much after the outward semblance of the ideal saint as can well be managed. The original notion was a very good one, and the revolution did not come before it was wanted; but it has been a little overdone of late, and we are threatened with as great a surfeit of small-limbed, yellow-headed criminals as we have had of the man-like black. One gets weary of the most perfect model in time, if too constantly repeated; as now, when we have all begun to feel that the resources of the angel's face and demon's soul have been more heavily drawn on than is quite fair, and that, given "heavy braids of golden hair," "bewildering blue eyes," "a small lithe frame," "a special delicacy of feet and hands," and we are booked for the companionship, through three volumes, of a young person to whom Messalina or Lucretia Borgia would be a mere novice.

And yet there is a physiological truth in this association of