resources. However disregarded they may hitherto have been, they will be wanted now. When admirers fall away, and flatterers become mute, the mind will be driven to retire into itself; and if it find no entertainment at home, it will be driven back again upon the world with increased force. Yet, forgetting this, do we not seem to educate our daughters exclusively for the transient period of youth, when it is to maturer life we ought to advert? Do we not educate them for a crowd, forgetting that they are to live at home? for the world, and not for themselves? for show, and not for use? for time, and not for eternity ?-36. VANITY (and the same may be said of selfishness) is not to be resisted like any other vice, which is sometimes busy and sometimes quiet; it is not to be attacked as a single fault which is indulged in opposition to a single virtue; but it is uniformly to be controlled, as an active, a restless, a growing principle, at constant war with all the Christian graces; which not only mixes itself with all our faults, but insinuates itself into all our virtues too; and will, if not checked, effectually rob our best actions of their reward. Vanity, if I may use the analogy, is, with respect to the other vices, what feeling is in regard to the other senses. It is not confined in its operation to the eye, or the ear, or any other organ, but diffused through the whole being, alive in every part, awakened and communicated by the slightest touch.-37. "TO LISP, and to amble, and to nickname God's creatures," has nothing to do with true gentleness of mind; and to be silly makes no necessary part of softness.-40. IT WERE Well if we, who have the advantage of contemplating the errors of the two extremes, were to look for truth where she is commonly to be found-in the plain and obvious middle. path, equally remote from each excess; and while we bear in mind that helpnessness is not delicacy, let us also remember that masculine manners do not necessarily include strength of character or vigour of intellect. THE true pleasures of childhood are cheap and natural; for every object teems with delight to eyes and hearts new to the enjoyment of life; nay, the hearts of healthy children abound with a general disposition to mirth and joyfulness, even without a specific object to excite it. Like our first parent, in the world's first spring, when all was new, and fresh, and gay about him,- "They live and move, Only furnish them with a few simple and harmless materials, and a little, but not too much leisure, and they will manufacture their own pleasures with more skill, and success, and satisfaction than they will receive from all that your money can purchase. Their bodily recreations should be such as will promote their health, quicken their activity, enliven their spirits, whet their ingenuity, and qualify them for their mental work. But, if you begin thus early to create wants, to invent gratifications, to multiply desires, to waken dormant sensibilities, to stir up hidden fires, you are studiously laying up for your children a store of premature caprice, and irritability, and discontent. Alas! that we should throw away this first grand opportunity of working into a practical habit the moral of this important truth, that the chief source of human discontent is to be looked for, not in our real, but in our factitious wants, not in the demands of nature, but in the artificial cravings of desire!-52. ALMOST any ornamental talent is a good thing when it is not the best thing a woman has; and talents are admirable when not made to stand proxy for virtues.-58. PEOPLE of piety should be more peculiarly on their guard against a spirit of idleness and a slovenly habitual wasting of time, because this practice, by not assuming a palpable shape of guilt, carries little alarm to the conscience. Even religious characters are in danger on this side; for not allowing themselves to follow the world in its excesses and diversions, they have consequently more time upon their hands; and instead of dedicating the time so rescued to its true purposes, they sometimes make, as it were, compensation to themselves for their abstinence from dangerous places of public resort, by an habitual frivolousness at home; by a superabundance of unprofitable small-talk, idle reading, and a quiet and dull frittering away of time. Their day perhaps has been more free from actual evil; but it will often be found to have been as unproductive as that of more worldly characters; and they will be found to have traded to as little purpose with their Master's talents.-64. YES! it is a few short but keen and lively intervals of animated pleasure, snatched from between the successive labours and duties of a busy day, looked forward to with hope, enjoyed with taste, and recollected without remorse, which, both to men and to children, yield the truest portion of enjoyment. Oh, snatch your offspring from adding to the number of those objects of supreme commiseration, who seek their happiness. in doing nothing! Life is but a short day, but it is a working day. Activity may lead to evil; but inactivity cannot be led to good.-68. Is THE author, then, inculcating the harsh doctrine of parental austerity? By no means. It drives the gentle spirit to artifice, and the rugged to despair. It generates deceit and cunning, the most hopeless and hateful in the whole catalogue of female failings. Discipline, however, is not cruelty, and restraint is not severity. We must strengthen the feeble, while we repel the bold. We cannot educate by a receipt; for after studying the best rules, and after digesting them into a system, much must depend on contingent circumstances. The cultivator of the human mind must, like the gardener, study diversities of soil, or he may plant diligently and water faithfully with little fruit. The skilful labourer knows that even where the surface is not particularly promising, there is often a rough, stony ground, which will amply repay the trouble of breaking it up; yet we are often most taken with a soft surface, though it conceal a shallow depth, because it promises present reward and little trouble. But strong and pertinacious tempers, of which perhaps obstinacy is the leading vice, under skilful management often turn out steady and sterling characters; while from softer clay a firm and vigorous virtue is but seldom produced.-78. A TALENT for conversation should be the result of educa tion, not its precursor: it is a golden fruit when suffered to ripen gradually on the tree of knowledge; but if forced in the hot-bed of a circulating library, it will turn out worthless and vapid in proportion as it was artificial and premature. Girls who have been accustomed to devour frivolous books, will converse and write with a far greater appearance of skill as to style and sentiment, at twelve or fourteen years old, than those of a more advanced age who are under the discipline of severer studies; but the former, having early attained to that low standard which had been held out to them, become stationary; while the latter, quietly progressive, are passing through just gradations to a higher strain of mind; and those who early begin with talking and writing like women, commonly end with thinking and acting like children. The irregular fancy of women is not sufficiently subdued by early application nor tamed by labour, and the kind of knowledge they commonly do acquire is easily attained; and being chiefly an acquisition of the memory, something which is given them to get off by themselves, and not grounded in their minds by comment and conversation, it is easily lost. The superficial question-and-answer way, for instance, in which they often learn history, furnishes the mind with little to lean on. The events being detached and separated, the actions having no links to unite them with each other, the characters not being interweaved by mutual relation, the chronology being reduced to disconnected dates, instead of presenting an unbroken series; of course, neither actions, events, characters, nor chronology fasten themselves on the understanding, but rather float in the memory than contribute to form the mind of the reader, or enrich his judgment in the important science of men and manners.-93. THE swarms of abridgments, beauties, and compendiums which form too considerable a part of a young lady's library, may be considered in many instances as an infallible receipt for making a superficial mind. It is not difficult to trace back to their shallow sources the hackneyed quotations of certain accomplished ladies, who will be frequently found not to have come legitimately by anything they know: I mean, not to have drawn it from its true spring, the original works of the author from which some beauty-monger has severed it.-94. WHAT is called dry, tough reading, independent of the knowledge it conveys, is useful as a habit, and wholesome as an exercise.-97. In your communications with young people, take care to convince them that, as religion is not a business to be laid aside with the lesson, so neither is it a single branch of dutysome detached thing, which, like the acquisition of an art or a language, is to be practised separately, and to have its distinct periods and modes of operation. But let them understand that common acts, by the spirit in which they are to be performed, are to be made acts of religion; that Christianity may be considered as having something of that influence over the conduct which external grace has over the manners; for as it is not the performance of some particular act which denominates any one to be graceful-grace being a spirit dif fused through the whole system, which animates every sentiment and informs every action; as she who has true personal grace has it uniformly, and is not sometimes awkward and sometimes elegant; does not sometimes lay it down and sometimes take it up-so religion is not an occasional act, but an in-dwelling principle, an in-wrought habit, a pervading and informing spirit from which indeed every act derives all its life, and energy, and beauty.-138. ᎪᎪᎪ PEOPLE are no more to be cheated into religion than into learning. The same spirit which influences your oath in a court of justice should influence your discourse in that court of equity-your family. Your children should be told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It is unnecessary to add, that it must be done gradually and discreetly. We know whose example we have for postponing that which the mind is not yet prepared to receive: "I have many things yet to say to you, but ye cannot bear them now."-142. It is of the last importance, in stamping on young minds a true impression of the genius of Christianity, to possess them with a conviction that it is the purity of the motive which not only gives worth and beauty, but which, in a Christian sense, gives life and soul to the best action: nay, that while a right intention will be acknowledged and accepted at the final judg ment, even without the act, the act itself will be disowned which wanted the basis of a pure design. How many splendid actions will be rejected in the great day of retribution, to which statues and monuments have been raised on earth, while their almost deified authors shall be as much confounded at their own unexpected reprobation as at the divine acceptance of those "whose life the world counted madness!” -144. SUPERIOR talents are not so common as by their frequency to offer much disturbance to the general course of human affairs; and many a lady, who tacitly accuses herself of neglecting her ordinary duties because she is a genius, will perhaps be found often to accuse herself as unjustly as good St. Jerome, when he laments that he was beaten by the angel for being too Ciceronian in his style.-162. THOSE Women in whom the natural defects of a warm temper have been strengthened by an education which fosters their faults, are very dexterous in availing themselves of a hint, when it favours a ruling inclination, soothes vanity, indulges indolence, or gratifies their love of power. They have heard so often from their favourite sentimental authors, and their more flattering male friends, "that when nature denied them strength, she gave them fascinating graces in compensation; that their strength consists in their weakness;" and that "they are endowed with arts of persuasion which supply the absence of force and the place of reason;" that they learn, in time, to pride themselves on that very weakness, and to become vain of their imperfections, till at |