ed nooks and break up their goodly company

"Death bursts amongst them like a shell,
And strews them over half the town."

They will form new combinations, lighten other men's toil, and soothe
another's sorrow. Fool that I was to call anything _mine_!

_Augustine Birrell._

THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMAN

It is universally conceded that our great-grandmothers were women of
the most precise life and austere manners. The girls nowadays display
a shocking freedom; but they were partly led into it by the relative
laxity of their mothers, who, in their turn, gave great anxiety to a
still earlier generation. To hear all the "Ahs" and the "Well, I
nevers" of the middle-aged, one would fancy that propriety of conduct
was a thing of the past, and that never had there been a "gaggle of
girls" (the phrase belongs to Dame Juliana Berners) so wanton and
rebellious as the race of 1895. Still, there must be a fallacy
somewhere. If each generation is decidedly wilder, more independent,
more revolting, and more insolent than the one before, how exceedingly
good people must have been four or five generations ago! Outside the
pages of the people so sweetly advertised as "sexual female
fictionists," the girls of to-day do not strike one as extremely bad.
Some of them are quite nice; the average is not very low. How lofty,
then, must have been the standard one hundred years ago, to make room
for such a steady decline ever since! Poor J. K. S. wrote:--

"If all the harm that's been done by men
Were doubled and doubled and doubled again,
And melted and fused into vapour, and then
Were squared and raised to the power of ten,
There wouldn't be nearly enough, not near,
To keep a small girl for a tenth of a year."

This is the view of a cynic. To the ordinary observer, the "revolting
daughters," of whom we hear so much, do not revolt nearly enough to
differentiate them duly from their virtuous great-grandmothers.

We fear that there was still a good deal of human nature in girls a
hundred, or even two hundred, years ago. That eloquent and animated
writer, the author of _The Whole Duty of Man_, published in the reign
of Charles II, a volume which, if he had had the courage of his
opinions, he would have named _The Whole Duty of Woman_. Under the
tamer title of _The Ladies' Calling_ it achieved a great success. In
the frontispiece to this work a doleful dame, seated on what seems to
be a bare altar in