and once more insist on truth as the foundation of our
national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do
not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be
brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the
semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women
are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home
business. Here is something for them to do--the regeneration of society
by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity
of truth and the beauty of simplicity; and the substitution of that
self-respect which is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride
which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get gold, and which
endeavors so hard to hide its real estate, and to pass for what it is
not and never could be.

PUSHING WOMEN.

The achievements of Anglo-Saxon energy present a rich mine of material
to the bookmaker. We are justly proud of our self-made men--of our
Chancellors who have risen from the barber's-shop to the Woolsack, of
our low-born inventors who have fought their way to scientific
recognition, of our merchant princes who have begun life with a capital
of one half-crown. The story of the man who has raised himself to
eminence by his own exertions, in the face of overwhelming disadvantages
and obstacles, is a thrice-told tale, thanks to Mr. Smiles and other
biographers. But our admiration has been almost exclusively drawn to
these signal examples of pushing _men_. The analogous exploits of the
fair sex remain comparatively unchronicled. No one has hitherto
published a book about Self-made Women. Yet this branch of the subject
would be very interesting, and even instructive. Of course the
opportunity for the display of energy in pushing is, in the case of
woman, much more limited. She cannot push at the Bar or in the Church,
or in business. Her sphere for pushing is practically narrowed down to
one department of human life--society. But within the limits of that
sphere she exhibits very remarkable proofs of this peculiar form of
activity. Moreover, pushing is a feature so peculiarly characteristic of
the English, as distinct from the Continental _salon_, that no attempt
to place a picture of the Englishwoman in her totality before her
foreign critics would be complete without it.

There are three periods in the career of a pushing woman. The first is
that in which she e