th confusion
their fathers and mothers. A mere assemblage of men and women is nothing
without the charms of refinement, vivacity, knowledge, and good-nature.
These are not born in a day; they seldom mark people till middle life,
when experiences are wide and feelings deep, when flippancy is not
mistaken for wit, nor impertinence for ease. A frivolous slave of dress
and ornament can no more belong to the circle of which I now speak, than
can a pushing, masculine woman to the sphere which she occasionally
usurps. Not dress, not jewelry, not pleasing manners, not even
innocence, is the charm and glory of society; but the wisdom learned by
experience, the knowledge acquired by study, the quickness based on
native genius. When woman has thus acquired these great resources,--by
books, by travel, by extended intercourse, and by the soaring of an
untrammelled soul,--then only does she shine and guide and inspire, and
become, not the equal of man, but his superior, his mentor, his guardian
angel, his star of worship, in that favored and glorious realm which is
alike the paradise and the empire of the world!

AUTHORITIES.

Miss J. M. Luyster's Memoirs of Madame Recamier; Memoirs and
Correspondence by Lenormant; Marquis of Salisbury's Historical Sketches;
Mrs. Thomson's Queens of Society; Guizot's sketch of Madame Recamier;
Biographie Universelle; Dublin Review, 57-88; Christian Examiner,
82-299; Quarterly Review, 107-298; Edinburgh Review, 111-204; North
British Review, 32; Bentley's Magazine, 26-96; The Nation, 3, 4, 15;
Fraser's Magazine, 40-264.

MADAME DE STAEL,

* * * * *

A. D. 1766-1817.

WOMAN IN LITERATURE.

It was two hundred years after woman began to reign in the great cities
of Europe as queen of society, before she astonished the world by
brilliant literary successes. Some of the most famous women who adorned
society recorded their observations and experiences for the benefit of
posterity; but these productions were generally in the form of memoirs
and letters, which neither added to nor detracted from the splendid
position they occupied because of their high birth, wit, and social
fascinations. These earlier favorites were not courted by the great
because they could write, but because they could talk, and adorn courts,
like Madame de Sevigne. But in the eighteenth century a class of women
arose and gained great celebrity on account of their writings, like
Hannah More