As if

her who was made to be 'the help-meet for man.' he could be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave!

"Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear and harmonious idea - it must be harmonious if it is true

of what womanly mind and virtue are, in power and office, with respect to man's; and how their relations, rightly accepted, aid and increase the vigor and 'honor and authority of both.

"Let us see whether the greatest, the wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in any wise on this point. Let us hear the testimony they have left respecting what they held to be the true dignity of woman, and her mode of help to man.

"And, first, let us take Shakspeare.

"Note broadly in the outset, Shakspeare has no heroes: he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes of the stage, and the still slighter Valentine in the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona.' In his labored and perfect plays, you have no hero. Othello would have been one, if his simplicity had not been so great as to leave him the prey of every base practice round him; but he is the only example, even approximating to the heroic type. Coriolanus, Cæsar, Antony, stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities; Hamlet is indolent and drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice

languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of use at the critical time, and he sinks into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved, by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose; Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Katherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless, conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity.

"Then observe, secondly,

"The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his misunderstanding of his children: the virtue of his one true daughter would have saved him from all the injuries of the others, if he had not cast her away from him; as it is, she all but saves him.

"Of Othello I need not trace the tale, nor the one weakness of his so mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to that even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testimony against his error: 'O murderous coxcomb! What should such a fool do with so good a wife?'

"In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and entirely brave stratagem of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the reckless impatience of her husband. In Winter's Tale and in Cymbeline, the happiness and existence of two princely households, lost through long years, and imperilled to the death by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at last by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In Measure for Measure, the injustice of the judges, and the corrupt cowardice of the brother, are opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine purity of a woman. In Coriolanus, the mother's counsel, acted upon in time, would have saved her son from all evil; his momentary forgetfulness of it is his ruin; her prayer, at last granted, saves him, not, indeed, from death, but from the curse of living as the destroyer of his country.

“And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickleness of a lover who is a mere wicked child; of Helena, against the petulance and insult of a careless youth; of the patience of Hero; the passion of Beatrice; and the calmly devoted wisdom of the 'unlessoned girl,' who appears among the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive passions of men, as a gentle angel, to save merely by her presence, and defeat the worst intensities of crime by her smile?

"Observe, further, among all the principal figures in Shakspeare's plays, there is only one weak woman, Ophelia; and it is because she fails Hamlet at the critical

moment, and is not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide to him when he needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows. Finally, though there are three wicked women among the principal figures, - Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril, — they are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life; fatal in their influence also in proportion to the power for good which they have abandoned.

"Such, in broad light, is Shakspeare's testimony to the position and character of woman in human life. He represents them as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, incorruptibly just and pure examples, strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save."

Some readers may say the judgment of Mr. Ruskin is in fault, as he finds so little to censure in the feminine character. They may call his pictures ideal, because they seem so unlike the plain, prosaic sketches of life in our homes, and say that his heroines are no examples.

This is the mistake which spoils much innocent enjoyment, and hinders much good, that we do not enough prize the present, nor take advantage of our own opportunities. Every one has a part to perform in the "Drama of Life:" the aim should be to do it in the best manner. Every example of a "perfect woman " is a lamp to our feet.

American ladies have advantages of education, social position, and home life, which should make them excel even the heroines of Shakspeare, as Mr. Ruskin has interpreted their characters.

MUCH

still it seems to me that its true nature is too little understood; that forgetting the double character it should possess, and which the very etymology of the word suggests to us, we are all too apt to make it a onesided affair, a sort of monologue, instead of a turning over of subjects with another.

Conversation, in the strictest sense, must ever be the interchange of thought and feeling; not the assertion or declaration of opinion on one side, without the permission of corresponding expression on the other.

This is not unfrequently the case with persons who are said to possess "great conversational powers; " but that term is certainly misapplied. Great talkers they may be; and, more than this, they may have a vast fund of information; but they can never be agreeable companions, or popular in society, from their unwillingness to permit any sort of dissent from their opinion, indeed scarcely an expression of any opinion at all from anyone else.

In M. Boitard's book, a French work of some little note, entitled "Guide-Manuel de la Bonne Compagnie, du Bon Ton, et de la Politesse," there are some valuable hints on this subject. Here is one.

In speaking of the habit just alluded to, he cites a case in point.