much it despises, how much it can
save; but the glory of youth, the joy of genius, the height and charm
of life, is the exuberance of the expenditure of force they can
afford. Their standard of success is how much their sympathies can
include, how much they can revere and love and serve. It is
littleness and misery to make a private hoard of the good of the
universe. The amount it lavishes measures the wealth of the rich and
happy soul. That will be a blessed day when we make our social
parties not for the purpose of ostentation or luxury, not to give
dinners or suppers in return for those to which we have been invited,
not to secure acquaintances who will aid in gratifying our external
ambition, but simply to enjoy the society of friends whom we honor
and love, to enhance our interior life by sincere spiritual
intercourse, the reflection of minds and hearts. Wherever human
beings meet, the bazaar of Fate stands open.

Another duty, closely allied with the foregoing, and especially
incumbent on the finest and highest women, is to improve the common
standard of good manners. This is a region of influence of momentous
importance, and for which the most honored and beloved women have a
pre-eminent adaptation by their beauty, grace, docility, and
sympathetic ease of self-sacrifice. To associate with a quick-witted
woman is an education. The last words of Madame Pompadour, addressed
to her withdrawing confessor, just before her final breath, were,
"Wait a moment, father; and we will go out together." In a democratic
age and country like ours, many causes are at work to lower the
average standard of manners by generating universal self-assertion,
arrogance, and irreverence. As compared with the gracious type of
chivalric manners exhibited in the best specimens of three or four
centuries ago, it must be confessed that sweetness of dignity,
abundance of courtesy, gentleness, magnanimity, have suffered badly.
No gentle and lofty mind can turn from the reading of Digby's "Broad
Stone of Honor" to that of Thackeray's "Book of Snobs," without deep
pain. Here is a field of influence superlatively fitted for the
activity of women, and worthy of the aspirations of the most favored
and admirable representatives of the sex. Opinions may ascend; but
manners descend.

The chief source of complacency to petty natures is in contemplating
the weaknesses of their superiors. Pride nourishes itself by gazing
on inferiors, and heightening the