se to spend their wages on a similar object. When every one above the
rank of a governess dresses in a manner suitable to her station,
complaints will be no longer heard about "unbecoming" finery below
stairs. The chief incentive to showy dress among the "lower orders of
females" is unquestionably a desire to ape the extravagance of their
betters. Remove that incentive, and the evil which a "Clergyman's Wife"
so forcibly deplores will soon cure itself.

We hope that she may be induced to turn her reforming zeal into another
direction. Instead of indulging in childish projects for putting the
Sunday-school, and the church singers, and maid-servants, and the lower
orders of females generally into uniforms, let her attack the mischief
at its root, and persuade the fine ladies of the earth to curtail their
monstrous prodigality and immodest vagaries in dress. Let her add her
warning voice to that of the Head of Latin Christianity, who has
recently denounced this scandal of the age with the same perennial vigor
that characterizes his anathemas on the Subalpine Government.

AESTHETIC WOMAN.

It is the peculiar triumph of woman in this nineteenth century that she
has made the conquest of Art. Our grandmothers lived in the kitchen, and
debased their finer faculties to the creation of puddings and pies. They
spun, they knitted, they mended, they darned, they kept the accounts of
the household, and scolded the maids. From this underground existence of
barbaric ages woman has at last come forth into the full sunshine of
artistic day; she has mounted from the kitchen to the studio, the
sketching-desk has superseded the pudding-board, sonatas have banished
the knitting-needle, poetry has exterminated weekly accounts. Woman, in
a word, has realized her mission; it is her characteristic, she tells us
through a chorus of musical voices, to represent the artistic element of
the world, to be pre-eminently the aesthetic creature.

Nature educates her, as Wordsworth sang long ago, into a being of her
own, sensitive above all to beauty of thought and color, and sound and
form. Delicate perceptions of evanescent shades and tones, lost to the
coarser eye and ear of man, exquisite refinements of spiritual
appreciation, subtle powers of detecting latent harmonics between the
outer and the inner world of nature and the soul, blend themselves like
the colors of the prism in the pure white light of woman's organization.
And so the host