"

purity of conduct,-love that which, if you are rich and fifty others, with their shrewd and delicate observation of great, will sanctify the blind fortune which has made you life? How many of us can place our prose beside the so, and make men call it justice,-love that which, if you glowing rhetoric and daring utterance of social wrong in are poor, will render your poverty respectable, and make the learned romances and powerful articles of Eliza Lynn, the proudest feel it unjust to laugh at the meanness of or the cutting sarcasm and vigorous protests of Miss your fortunes,-love that which will comfort you, adorn Rigby? What chance have we against Miss Martineau, you, and never quit you,-which will open to you the so potent in so many directions? In fact, the women kingdom of thought, and all the boundless regions of have made an invasion of our legitimate domain. They conception, as an asylum against the cruelty, the injus-write novels, and they write histories, they write travels tice, and the pain that may be your lot in the outer world, that which will make your motives habitually great and an honourable, and light up in instant a thousand noble disdains at the very thought of meanness and of fraud.-Rev. Sydney Smith.

THE BILL OF BILLS.

and they ransack chronicles, they write articles and they
write dramas, they write leaders and they write treatises.
This is the "march of mind," but where, oh, where are
Does it never strike these delightful
the dumplings!
creatures, that their little fingers were made to be kissed
not to be inked? Does it never occur to them that they
are doing us a serious injury, and that we need "protec-

But I should like to know

This one Bill, which lies yet unenacted, a right EDU-tion?" Woman's proper sphere of activity is elsewhere. CATION BILL, is not this of itself the sure parent of Are there no husbands, lovers, brothers, friends to coddle innumerable wise Bills,-wise regulations, practical me- and console? Are there no stockings to darn, no purses thods and proposals, gradually ripening towards the state to make, no braces to embroider? My idea of a perfect of Bills? To irradiate with intelligence, that is to say, woman is of one who can write, but won't; who knows with order, arrangement, and all blessedness, the Chaotic, all that authors know, and a great deal more; who can Unintelligent; how, except by educating, can you accom-appreciate my genius, and not spoil my market; who can plish this? That thought, reflection, articulate utterance, pet me, and flatter me, and flirt with me, and work and understanding be awakened in their individual million for me, and sing to me, and love me: I have named heads, which are the atoms of your Chaos; there is no Julia. Yes, she is a perfect woman; she never wrote a other way of illuminating any Chaos! The sum-total book. Political economists complain of young ladies of intelligence that is found in it determines the extent making purses and embroidering braces as taking work of order possible for your Chaos; the feasibility and from the industrious classes. rationality of what your Chaos will dimly demand from what they call writing books and articles but taking work It is from the industrious authors? To knit a purse or work you, and will gladly obey when proposed by you! an exact equation; the one accurately measures the other. an ottoman is a graceful and useful devotion of female If the whole English People, during these "twenty years energies. Ellen has worked me an ottoman; and certain of respite," be not educated, with at least schoolmaster's fair fingers are at this moment employed upon embroidereducating, a tremendous responsibility, before God and ing me an arm-chair, That is what I call something like man, will rest somewhere! How dare any man, espe- woman's mission! An arm-chair! consider how useful, cially a man calling himself Minister of God, stand up how luxurious, how suggestive of kind thoughts, as wearied in any Parliament or place, under any pretext or delusion, from the labours of the day you sink into its arms and and for a day or an hour forbid God's Light to come say, "Well, dear Penelope worked me this; God bless into the world, and bid the Devil's Darkness continue in her!" Women of England! listen to my words:-Your it one hour more! For all light and science, under all path is the path of perdition; your literary impulses are Burn your pens, and purchase shapes, in all degrees of perfection, is of God. All the impulses of Satan. "The wool. Arm-chairs are to be made; waistcoats can be darkness, nescience, is of the enemy of God. schoolmaster's creed is somewhat awry!" Yes; I have embroidered; throw yourselves courageously into this found few creeds entirely correct; few light beams shining department, and you will preserve the deep love, respect, white, pure of admixture: but of all creeds and religions and gratitude (when you work him chairs) of your sornow or ever before known, was not that of thoughtless, rowful and reproachful-" VIVIAN.”—The Leader. thriftless Animalism, of Distilled Gin, and Stupor and Despair, unspeakably the least orthodox? We will exchange it, even with Paganism, with Fetishism; and, on the whole, must exchange it with something.-CARLYLE, Past and Present.

WOMEN-WRITERS.

It's a melancholy fact, and against all political economy, that the group of female authors is becoming every Women year more multitudinous and more successful. write the best novels, the best travels, the best reviews, the best leaders, and the best cookery-books. They write on every subject and in every style, from terribly learned books on Egypt and Etruria, down to Loose Thoughts, by a Lady. They are turning us men into "drugs" (in the market, of course! metaphorically and not apothecarily)— they are ruining our profession. Wherever we carry our skilful pens, we find the place preoccupied by a woman. The time was when my contributions were sought as favours; my graceful phrase was to be seen threading, like a meandering stream, through the rugged mountains of statistics, and the dull plains of matter of fact, in every possible publication. Then the pen was a profession: but now I starve. What am I to do-what are my brother pens to do, when such rivalry is permitted? How many of us can write novels like Currer Bell, Mrs. Gaskell, Geraldine Jewsbury, Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Crowe, and

MUDDLING AWAY AN INCOME.

No one is less respected than a man who muddles away For all expenditure a large income, nobody knows how. there should be something to show, and that something ought to have either usefulness, or dignity, or permanence to recommend it. But every now and then we meet with cases of expenditure perfectly mysterious. A man of princely inheritance or preferment does nothing, makes no figure, helps nobody, has no expensive taste, yet not only spends every sixpence of his income, but gets into difficulties. His domain is neglected, his house ill-furnished, his equipages shabby, his servants ill-paid, his subscriptions in arrears, his hospitality mean, his sons stinted, his daughters portionless, his estate encumbered; in fact, everything goes to rack and ruin about him. Instead of performing his part in sustaining the great fabric of society, as far as his influence extends, there is one vast dilapidation. He may be said to crumble and crash in every direction. Nobody can say where the money is gone. It has not benefited friends, assisted dependents, built churches, fertilized the soil, ornamented the country, delighted the town, or done anything that a man can lay his hand upon. It has all been dribbled and fribbled away on hollow pretences and petty occasions, without either system or object. It has won neither gratitude, nor admiration, nor respect.-Times.

fall in mountain masses with a silent dreadfulness, at the
mere vibration of the human voice, the fairy tread of the
curling mist, or the impulse of the passing eagle's wing.
For a time we seem to live our childhood over again, and
we are present once more at the household gatherings
round the old fireside on the merry Christmas Eve, or
the holy New Year's Night, when the solemn bells were
ringing the dirge of the old year, or welcoming its young
successor; the old family prayers, and the far dearer
private prayer by our own bedside, when the gentle
mother first folded our little hands together, and bade us
say, "Our Father;" the still calm Sunday, with its best
with its tiresome services, which we little thought then
clothes, its prim walk, two and two, to the old church,
were going so deep down into our heart of hearts.
old familiar faces come back, too, for a moment, and show
themselves once more as we saw them then! The reve-
rend grey hairs of the father and mother, now, alas!
sleeping side-by-side in the old village grave-yard, waiting
so silently, so serenely, for the promised waking! And
there come back to us again the gay companions who met
with us round that old fireside, delighting us with their
games, their songs, and their merry fictions; faces and
voices which made our youth-time a paradise, but which
the tempest, and the turmoil of life, have seldom per-

child. It is the season of dreams, and day visions, and longer find it a calm bright heaven-reflecting lake. Earth fictions. We have not as yet come into contact with the no longer stretches away before us in shadowless beauty, iron realities of life. There is, too, such an implicit faith like the paradise of an unfallen world. One false friend and wonderment in childhood. How reverently we be- has deceived us, and we hastily conclude all to be black lieved the stories, and the wonderful adventures of Jack and bad. Our companions, too, are gradually dropping and the Beanstalk; Sinbad, the Sailor; and Little Cinde-away from our side. The manifold businesses of life have rella, with her Little Glass Slipper. What tears we shed deprived us of many, while the grave has closed upon over the "Babes in the Wood," and how we loved the others. Early manhood is one of the most ardentlyRobins," for covering their little bodies up so decently, desired epochs of our lives, yet, is it the first in which we with the brown withered leaves of autumn. How eagerly begin to feel the pressure of the shroud and the pall. we gathered round the winter's hearth, to listen to the The Eolian music of life is gone, and the fair fields of wonderful tales of the Arabian Nights, and revelled in fancy, over which our young thoughts floated away on the gnomes, the genii, the gem-lit caverns, the blazing gilded gleaming wings, are rapidly fading from our sight. cities, and the subterraneous kingdoms of oriental fiction. The burden begins to weigh heavily on our shoulders, Alas! these are all memories now. Precious golden the step becomes more grave, and the brow more solemn; memories indeed are they, and their subdued and mellow earth's music wears a sadder, duller tone, the dirge steals lustre comes streaming ever and anon down the toilsome in upon the dance, and the revel is disturbed by the reways of life, and seems for a time, like moonlight on a quiem! Now, for the first time, we begin to treasure up the rugged landscape, to soften down all that is uneven and wasted dews of thought, and pausing on this first gentle inharmonious. upland of life, we turn a longing, lingering look upon the path which we have trodden, and the scenes which we are leaving behind us for ever. The sunshine wears a cloud, and truth has torn off the garments of falsehood, and taught us to take a correcter, and less flattering estimate of the world. Memory, too, prepares to decorate the niches in her solemn temple with the forms so dearly loved, but now for ever lost. That ancient school-house, which we once thought a dungeon, what a pleasant place it looks now! And the old pedagogue, with his monstrous spectacles, whom we once thought an apt representative of all ogres and giants, and whom we so sadly provoked with our mischievous games, what a kind, good old man he was! How much more sinned against, than sinning. Peace to his gentle shade! The whole group of our schoolfellows, too, we see them all again, as if it were but yesterday. Not one is missing; we could arrange them all in their classes, and at their desks, from that merry, mischievous, laughter-loving rogue, who was always annoying, and yet always amusing us with his

The transition from childhood to youth is not characterized by such strong mental changes, as those which accompany the transition from youth to manhood. Childhood seems to glide almost imperceptibly into youth; our Dooks and associations, and our companions are to a great extent the same, and if our games and amusements are of a somewhat ruder and rougher kind, they are still played on the old spots,-the village green, the neighbouring copse, the mill-stream, and the old family parlour. Our school days, too, are not yet ended-those days which our parents, as well as the old schoolmaster told us, in so many grave lectures, were the happiest days of our life. We did'nt believe a word of it all then, to our minds it was a plain contradiction. What! to be shut up during all the long, bright summer days, in an old school-house, among broken forms and dusty books, learning whole pages of grammar, geography, and propria quæ maribus, with the foolscap, and the still more awful "rod for the fool's back," in perspective, and then to be told that these were the happiest days of our life! Most willingly would we have foregone all these strange elements of happiness, and consented to have become miserable in our own way. It was then that hope began to whisper flatteringly in our ear, of the time when we should no longer have frowns or flagellation to fear, but become our own masters, and go whithersoever we would.

noon!

It was then, too, that we first began to hold strange and sacred converse with the outer world: the calm, the storm, the quiet eve, the sunshine, and the pleasant The song of birds, the hum of bees, the softlipped zephyr floating in flute-like music over the twilight sea; the rippling streamlet gliding along between its thickly-wooded banks, in the hot silence of a July noon, and seeming by its eternal freshness to be the only thing capable of exertion. The solemn mountains, and the autumn woods seem at this season of life to be peopled with spirits and voices visible and audible to youth alone. The brooding quiet of the evening sky is to its gifted vision like the first unfolded page of the golden scroll of prophecy, in the radiant cyphers of which it attempts to read its future destiny. Then, for the first time, the human soul becomes conscious of its god-like nature, and the grandeur of its immortal destiny, and looking forth from its veiled sanctuary, it bows down before the august divinity of nature, and tenders it its soft and solemn spirit worship.

A popular writer has remarked, that nine times out of tea, it is over the bridge of sighs that we pass the narrow gulf from youth to manhood. That interval is usually occupied by an ill-placed, or disappointed affection; and though the intellect may come out hardened by the trial, the moral nature, the trusting faith of youth has undergone an irreparable shock. We have advanced farther into the black swollen, turbid torrent of life, and we no

"Quips and cranks and wanton wiles."

down to that grave, melancholy boy, who never fought a battle, nor took part in a mischievous trick, but told us strange and wondrous tales, as would often "beguile us of our ears.' ""

But as early manhood ripens into maturity, these dreams and memories of the past come less seldom upon the spirit. As the distance which divides us from the past widens, the gathering mist of years settles down upon its peaceful vales and sunny landscapes; and the faint light which streams down upon the crumbling homes of youth and childhood, though beautiful as autumn sunset in an Alpine solitude, is sad as moonlight upon graves.

We dream most at the beginning and close of life; middle age is too deeply engaged in the world to give much time to dreams, however beautiful. The chain and the yoke bind us too closely to the stern realities of existence. The iron has entered into our soul, and a feverish restlessness and anxiety for wealth and fame has enthroned itself in our heart. The extent of our wandering shows us but the limit of our chain, and our attempts to soar only reveal to us the lowness of our dungeon. We feel a proud impulse stirring within us, urging us to struggle for the wreath of intellectual pre-eminence. We may not be idle amidst the busy throng which is hemming us in, and panting to outstrip us in the race. over the dead bodies of dissimulation, envy, and despair, we battle on till every energy is exhausted, every hope gone; and old age, pitying our unavailing strife, leads us back to the home of our childhood to spend the evening of our days in peace.

And so

Such are the "Phases of Life." Such the round of fate to one-to all of us. A buoyant imaginative youth, a vigorous manhood, a restless maturity, a decrepit old

age, a deathbed made beautiful by the abiding love of some few true-hearted friends, and a quiet grave in the old church where we breathed our first prayer. Yes! however widely men may wander in life, they come home to die, to lay themselves down to rest in their fathers' sepulchre !

Like those cunning Indian arrows, which when they have described the intended arc, return to the spot from whence they were projected, so the spent life-travellers carry back their bodies to the starting point of home! The dying eagle drags its feeble flight to its own eyrie, and the passage-birds come back to die in the woods, where they first tried their infant wings; and so men, worn and weary men, gather back, from commerce-mart and battle-field, to resign their consciousness where first it broke into being.

sacrifice of self, for some great, good, and holy cause, not of individual, but of national, and, it may be, of worldwide benefit. Onward he goes, surmounting obstacles, obviating difficulties, and risking almost martrydom in battling mayhap the legioned prejudices of an age gone by. All this he does, and happily; for knows he not that within his breast he has an approving voice, which urges in lovingly courageous tones" On, on, still on?" He strives to do so, and then comes the unkindest cut of all,-his motives are suspected; his great heart it is insinuated, is but a nest for interested motives to take shelter in, and the bold front with which he faces dangers, it is whispered in the world, is but the brazen impudence necessary to gain his selfish point. And he, too, staggers under these frequent stingings of the social snake, until at length he falls, a good soul withered, a noble man degraded by foul suspicions and calumniating hints. And then the awful amount of double-dealing that ensues in consequence of this prevalence of suspecting every man; think of the immense amount of hypocrisy it engenders. "Sir," says the employer to the employed, "I place every confidence in you,-you are my second self," and he straightway encircles him with such a labyrinth of "checks," that rather a bad than a noble spirit is aroused; and it is looked upon more as a challenge to beat cunning by cunning, than as a trust deposited to his care to be held sacred, and guarded as a point of honour and of manly pride—a feeling, I believe, which is inheThe prevalence of suspicion, and the absence of confidence-Therent in the breast of every human being, and needs but consequences-An old man and his narrative-Early morningFrank Manly and Lucy Summerton--The parting at the little knoll-Mr. Pettymens, and his "shrewd suspicion "The dark cloud and the sun-light,

Such is life, a thing made up of moments, too often unwisely squandered away, and wasted by young hearts who know not their value, and forget that their memories of sanctity or sin will pervade for ever the whole firmament of being. Gentle reader, moments are the dice of destiny; cast them well, eternity hangs upon the hazard of the die. B. B. W.

MY WALK TO "THE OFFICE."

NO. V.

Ir cannot but appear to every thinking mind an anomaly of a very mischievous character, that in a state of society where every act of our lives proves beyond the questioning of the most self-reliant, that mutual dependence is a law of Nature, that so little confidence, or rather I should say so much suspicion or distrust is found to exist. Arguing from natural premises, one would infer that mutual dependence would beget mutual confidence; and, as a result, mutual trustworthiness. And yet no man can be so ignorant of things as they exist in our social scale at present, without being aware that the opposite of this obtains, and that, too, to an extent far greater than appears from a superficial glance. And there is one peculiarity about this social suspicion worthy of remark, that, having been generated in the morbid imagination of an unhealthy mind, it creates by its very nature real causes for distrust and doubt; and thus is produced as a sequence an immense amount of crime, which, without such an incentive, would either never have existed at all, or at least would not have been excited to action.

In proof of this I would remark-How many a prison inmate has taken his first step in guilt from an unjust suspicion originally attached to him! How many a mind, once pure and innocent of any wilful wrong, has been imbued with ideas which have led directly to a course which ends in confirmation of a suspicion first wrongfully entertained! and how many and many a man toiling up the rough hill of life, sedulous in his respect for truth, honour, and an unblemished name, has been induced to change his course, to think his strength of mind put forth in the resistance of temptation but a very weakness, for which he may be sneered and scoffed at by his fellows, and to regard his fair fame as a thing not worth the keeping, since the suspicious gianca or insinuating doubt may blast it in the world's eye for aye; and he too becomes at last a socially created burden to the society he was created by his Maker to adorn.

Well, though this be bad enough, there is yet another phase in which this social scourge is still more redolent of ill. It is in the case of men striving with their heart's might, with all their mental energies, and at the utter

seeking to be found; and when found, how it should be cherished and preserved, seeing that it is the parent of so much that is praiseworthy, trustworthy, and true!

Now it must certainly be considered a somewhat singular coincidence, that on the very morning that these thoughts were tumbling over one another in a place which is lamentably deficient in depth and breadth, I was accidentally introduced to an old wayfarer on the world's high-road, who, to a great extent, confirmed the truth of my cogitations, by a narration with which he favoured me on a future occasion. There was something so mild, noble, and sincere in the look of this man, that one felt sure, after gazing at him, that he must have much to tell; for he wore that expression of genuine benevolence which could never pass through so many years of life as he had, without having become acquainted with the histories of many outcast wanderers,—of their temptations at first, too strong to be overcome; of the hand extended in confidence and honesty at last, too loving to be refused. And though I cannot hope to throw into the narrative that fervency of feeling which characterized my venerable friend, still I will endeavour to give it, as nearly as I can, in the words he used :

Some years ago (he commenced), before steam-engines had learnt to run, or telegraphic wires had been taught their letters, there was situated in a pretty little village, in that part of the county called the Garden of Norfolk, a cottage, half-smothered in the loveliness lent to it by the jasmines, honeysuckles, and climbing-roses which trailed their sweet and graceful tendrils about the diamond-paned windows and its little rustic porch. To the most careless observer, it was palpable that some presiding goddess watched with never-failing care over the whole; for neatness was visible in the most trifling details without, and the "bright things" within, from an antiquated spur which bung over the kitchen mantel-piece to the best brass candlesticks, were glittering like twinkling stars through the ground-floor windows.

On the morning to which I would more especially refer, the sun was scarcely visible above the horizon, and not a sound was heard save the chirping of the birds and the rising lark's first welcome to the new-born day. There was such a calm around that seemed to be not of this world at all, so holy seemed its peacefulness, so free from aught that could disturb the mind in its loftiest aspira