omen is that women,
with a few notable exceptions, are not yet properly educated to write
well, or to criticise well what others write. Remove this objection by
improving the curriculum of feminine education, and there is hardly any
other. There is none certainly of sufficient consequence to outweigh the
real need which is felt of giving those women something to live for
(apart from and above ordinary domestic and philanthropic duties), whose
good or evil fortune it is not to be marked out by Heaven for a married
life.

A WORD FOR FEMALE VANITY.

If any human weakness has a right to complain of the ingratitude with
which the world treats it, it is certainly vanity. It gets through more
good work, and yet comes in for more hearty abuse, than all our other
weaknesses put together. Preachers and moralists are always having hits
at it, and in that philosophical study and scientific vivisection of
character which two friends are always so ready to practice at the
expense of a third, and which weak-minded people confound with scandal,
to no foible is the knife so pitilessly applied as to vanity. What makes
this rigor seem all the more cruel and unnatural is that vanity never
gets so little quarter as from those who ought, one would think, to be
on the best possible terms with her. She is never justified of her
children, and, like Byron's unhappy eagle, "nurses the pinion that
impels the steel" against her. Yet it is difficult to see how the world
could get on without the weakness thus universally assailed, and what
preachers and moralists would do if they had their own way.

In the more important--or, we should rather say, in the larger--concerns
of life vanity could perhaps be dispensed with. Where there is much at
stake, other agencies come into play to keep the machinery of the world
in motion, though, even as regards these, it is a question how many
great poems, great speeches, great actions, which have profoundly
influenced the destinies of mankind, would have been lost to the world
if there had been none but great motives at work to produce them. Great
motives usually get the credit--that is, when we are dealing with
historical characters, not dissecting a friend, in whose case it is
necessary to guard against our natural proneness to partiality; but
little motives often do the largest share of the work. It is proper, for
instance, and due to our own dignity and self-respect to say, that the
world owes _Child