is clever, you say; but is he robust and tough,
and patient? and have you a certain allowance
to make him? Are you quite sure you
are consulting, not your own vanity, but his
happiness? Have you any suspicion of the
misery that has resulted from parental
determinations to have a parson in the family?
Pause before you imitate such courses, without
strong vocation and favourable circumstances
of every kind to guide your determination.
It is a pleasant picture, certainly, to
present to your mind's eye, —a young man
bearing your name and features, as a high
wrangler or a double first-class, as a fellow of
Trinity, or a student of Christ Church, with
the ladder of life before him to climb to the top.
But, remember also the possibility of a distaste
for the profession forced upon him; or of a
curacy, for life, of eighty or a hundred pounds
a-year, at most; of an ushership in school
after school, with no mastership to follow; of
a rushing in despair to Australia or Western
America, there to commence, better late than
never, a hopeful though a handicraft life;—
and all because you had set your heart on
having a clergyman in the family. You may
found your hopes on university honours, in
default of private patronage, because you
don't quite know what the universities are,
and have not the slightest idea of the knotty
points of Aristophanes, or the difficulties of
the differential calculus.

And the girls? If you have not fortunes
to give them, and do not want them to
remain at home, you will make of them—
what? Will you sacrifice them to that
insatiable Moloch of the middle classes, the
demon of gentility? Will you educate them
to be governesses? That is the life to which
are driven innumerable girls of genteel
connections, without considering whether they
are suited for it,—  or worse, without inquiring
whether it is suited for them. No notice
is taken of the astounding advertisements
headed, " Wanted a Governess," in the Times
and elsewhere; the fact is forgotten, that
if ever a market were overstocked, the
governess-market is that one; and the
poor child is made a governess! I know
a little of governess-life. We complain in
England that so few employments are open
to women; —which is partly the fault of the
women themselves, or rather of the friends
who have influence over them. All female
employment must be so excessively genteel!
There is no rule without exceptions; but,
this I say deliberately: if I had twenty
daughters whom I could not maintain (as
would be probable in such an hypothesis),
but whom I must send forth to earn their
living, I would rather see them ladies'-maids,
cooks, waitresses at inns, milliners, assistants
in shops, clerks and book-keepers where they
would be accepted as such, confectioners,
haberdashers,—  I would rather marry them
to some honest hard-working emigrant, kissing
them, as they went on board ship, with
the prospect of never more beholding them
in this world,—  than sentence them to the
ambiguous, the solitary, the pitied and pitiable,
the precarious, the dependent position
of a governess! You, my esteemed good
masters, will do what you like with your
own girls; that is what I would do with
mine.

There are two extremes, my reverend
seniors, into which we are tempted to fall
when we find ourselves upon the wane.
Declining ladies, especially married ladies, are
more given, I think, than men, to neglect
their personal appearance, when they are
conscious that the bloom of their youth is
gone. I do not speak of state occasions, of
set dinner-parties and full-dress balls, but of
the daily meetings of domestic life. Now,
however, is the time, above all others,
when the wife must determine to remain
the pleasing wife, and retain her John
Anderson's affections to the last, by neatness,
taste, and appropriate variety of dress. That
a lady has fast-growing daughters, strapping
sons, and a husband hard at work at his
office all day long, is no reason why she
should ever enter the family circle with
rumpled hair, soiled cap, or unfastened gown.
The prettiest woman in the world would be
spoiled by such sins in her toilette. The
morning's duties, even in store-room and
kitchen, may be performed in fitting, tidy
costume, and then changed for parlour
habiliments, equally tidy and fitting. The
fashion of the day should always be reflected
in a woman's dress, according to her position
and age; the eye craves for variety as keenly
as the palate; and then, I honestly protest,
whatever her age, a naturally good-looking
woman is always handsome. For, happily,
there exists more than one kind of beauty.
There is the beauty of infancy, the beauty of
youth, the beauty of maturity, and, believe
me, ladies and gentlemen, the beauty of age,
if you do not spoil it by your own want of
judgment. At any age, a woman may be
becomingly and pleasingly dressed.

The other error—  the more pardonable of
the two, because it shows an amiable love of
approbation and a desire to please, though
it implies weakness—  is a continuation of the
costume and decorations of youth after they
have ceased to be fitting ornaments for the
wearer's age. I must say that ladies in
general are less addicted to the mistake
than men. The number of quinquagenarian
females who display themselves in
society in white muslin frocks, with their
locks in ringlets, and a girl's pink sash tied
behind, is considerably less than that of
old bucks, with their padded substitute
for muscular grace, their wigs, their jewellery,
their perfumes, and even their rouge.
Baldness, in men, is neither a disfigurement
nor a disgrace. To soothe your personal
vanity, you may call to mind that many young
and handsome men are bald; to console your