and now conquered the elements at their
maddest. And in the very moment of that great
victory—It was gone.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF YOURSELF.

CAREFUL mammas are apt to box the ears of
little girls who jump up on chairs to look
at themselves in the glass—at least careful
mammas were wont so to do in the primitive
ages, when the ears of little girls could, under
any circumstances, and for any misdeeds, be
boxed at all. But no amount of smarting or
smiting can, I take it, cure little girls when
grown up, of a habit which is as natural to them
as that of nursing a doll when they are little.
Indeed, I see no valid reason why it should. It
is all very well for us, grizzled and wrinkled
ones, whose good looks are of antediluvian
date, to inveigh against female vanity,
coquetry, display, and the like; but none of our
fierce invective will alter the real and
immutable state of the case—that it is one of the
chiefest points in that " woman's mission" about
which so much insupportable clap-trap has been
lately said and sung, to look comely and graceful,
in order that she may attract men, and, in
process of time, get married, and become the happy
mother of blooming children. Now, this
comeliness and gracefulness, if the requirements of
civilisation are to be consulted, are unattainable
without a mirror. Beauty when unadorned
adorned the most, is a charming bit of word
jingling; but Cicely Mop the dairymaid, without
even a scrap of looking-glass to assist her
in parting her hair symmetrically and adjusting
her neck-ribbon in a becoming manner, will
scarcely persuade Colin Clout the ploughman
to ask her to wed. Miss Feejee, the island
beauty, may contrive to stick a fish-bone
through her nose, and plaster her cheeks and
forehead with ochre and orpiment, without the aid
of a toilet-mirror; but still, she would give her
ears for the merest fragment of a ship captain's
shaving-glass. Ask the "prison matron" what
is the direst punishment that female convicts
have to undergo. She will tell you that it is not
low diet, or the dark cells, or even hair-cutting
—agonising as the tonsure is. It is the
deprivation of looking-glasses.

Boys, whose "mission" it is not—or at least,
it should not be—to fascinate, are not much
given to surveying their own reflexions in
polished surfaces. I did once know a boy at
school who was continually staring into a glass;
but vanity was not his motive. He was a boy
with a raw talent for making grimaces, and
being, besides, of an ambitious turn, the notion
had grown, upon him that he could, by assiduous
practice, put his tongue into his ear. He
studied this difficult feat with such pertinacity,
and with such horrible distortions of his facial
muscles, that we, his admiring schoolfellows,
began to think of lock-jaw, and grew alarmed.
One of us happened to remember the old story
of the madman, who, standing at the top window
of an asylum with a sane person, remarked what
rare sport it would be if he were to fling him
out of it; to which the sane person had the
sagacity to reply that the sport would be
much easier if he, the maniac, would step down
to the court-yard, and try to jump up to the
window. The madman had never thought of
that, he said; and, stepping down accordingly,
was promptly pounced upon, and popped into
a padded room. Applying this apologue by
analogy, the juvenile sage I speak of suggested
to the boy who made faces, that he would gain
everlasting renown if he could only contrive to
force his nose into one of his eyes. He tried,
and failed, naturally, and, falling from the giddy
height of his ambition, took a soberer view of
things, and let his tongue alone for the future.

To sneer at a woman for spending a large
proportion of her time at the dressing-table is
a fashion as old as envy, malice, and other
uncharitableness; but no rational male could be
seriously angry with his spouse, or his sister, or
his sweetheart, for resorting to the indispensable
aid of the mirror towards enhancing her
personal charms. If bonnets ceased to be properly
tied, and pork-pie hats coquettishly adjusted;
if ladies had not looking-glasses to counsel them
how much pearl-powder to put on, and how
much to rub off; there would be an end, I
apprehend, to society. Let me put a case. Have
you ever seen a lady come down to dinner, or
into the drawing-room to respond to a morning
call, with a small circular dab of some floury
substance on the tip of her finely-chiselled nose?
I have. That farinaceous disc has at once made
havoc of all her charms, stultified her jewellery,
rendered nugatory all her Maltese lace, deleted
her mauve ribbons. The cause of the catastrophe
has generally been self-evident. She has
completed her toilette in a hurry, and forgotten
that last and supreme glance at the looking-glass
after applying the powder-puff. There are
ladies, you may object, who never use powder.
Ask them. Ask the photographers. Ask the
chemists and druggists.

The ladies, I am emboldened to hope, will
render me a proper meed of gratitude for this
candid defence of their right to gaze upon their
own sweet reflected images as long and as
frequently as ever they please. But I intend to go
a step further. Men are given, as a rule, to
look with aversion and contempt on members
of their own sex who habitually take counsel of
the looking-glass. When I was a little boy, the
nursemaid used to warn me off the reflective
premises by telling me that if I looked in the
glass too long, I should see the devil leering over
my shoulder. I think, now, that a little
imprisonment and hard labour would have done
that nursemaid no harm. As we grow up, we
fall into the habit of sneering at the man who
is fond of viewing himself. We brand him as
a softy and a sillikin. We speak of him as a
"grinning ape." The prejudice against such a
Narcissus is strengthened by the fact that, in
nine cases out of ten, he is really and wholly a
fool. Thus, Lord Claude Miffles, who looks at