led his "glorious phalanx of old maids."[31]

Another wrong is often done to the young girl, under the name of
prudence or worldly wisdom, by breaking down her ideal of life, and
especially her ideal of the possible partner of her future life.
Tennyson speaks of one form of this, in addressing the vain coquette as
the possible future mother:--

"Oh, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part,
With a little hoard of maxims, preaching down a daughter's heart."

Men often speak of the pain it is to them to see the debasement of
woman, because she represents to them an ideal of good, the other nobler
self, for which they must strive. Man should represent the same thing to
woman. Love should see in its object the very crown and glory of
creation.

"The person love to us doth fit,
Like manna, hath the taste of all in it."

But the low social standard of morals and manners for man has so
degraded him, that the very ideal of manhood is belittled, and the
mother warns her daughter not to expect much from her future husband;
she has no right to hope for the loyalty of Sir Philip Sydney or the
pure ideality of Michael Angelo.

It is a great wrong to man to demand so little from him. All human
beings from childhood upwards are stimulated by the opinion entertained
of them, and the claims upon them for noble and high behavior. Whatever
your own experience, do not thrust the poison of doubt and unbelief in
goodness into a daughter's mind. Let her keep her faith and her romance,
and look for a hero to win her young heart. True, it is hard to see a
Thaddeus of Warsaw with a cigar in his mouth, or to imagine Hamlet with
a blue veil about his hat, but nevertheless the race of heroes is not
extinct, and the girl had better preserve her faith and her love till
the true knight appears, than accept the dreary belief that all men are
alike unworthy, and that she must not ask for a purity and truth which
exist only in the dreams of romance. Man's low idea of woman has reacted
upon him; her elevation will restore him to his true dignity, as equally
entitled to spiritual and moral elevation of soul and refinement of
manners with herself. It is as demoralizing to young women to hold men
in contempt, as it is for young men to have a low idea of women. "In
honor preferring one another" is the true condition of love, and no one
has truly loved who has not exalted the beloved far above one's self.

But, after all that