she thinks advisable to the care of servants. Needlework is, doubtless, occasionally a serious impediment to reading; but in many cases where this objection is urged, is there not rather a choice of economy than a positive obligation to slave at the needle? Does not the mother prefer saving the wages of a seamstress rather than the salary of a governess, and take more pleasure in embroidering frocks than in preparing herself for future teaching? We refer this question to the conscience of those young mothers who, day after day, profess sorrow at seeing books lie unopened on their table; and feel their minds gradually losing the better tastes and habits of earlier days, because frocks and pelisses must be braided, and frills take so long to embroider! If they are sincere in their regret, let them inquire more closely into the matter, and they will find that the price of needlework for the whole year would amount probably to less than half the salary of the governess, whose place they are rendering themselves incapable to fill, and that if braid and embroidery were cast aside altogether, the amount of both time and money required would be reduced considerably, and the cultivation of vanity and love of dress in their children be postponed at least to a later period. Needlework is so essential a female occupation that every woman should be practically well acquainted with it in all its useful branches; as in all other household occupations she ought to have thorough knowledge of what she is directing her servants to do, that carelessness and fraud may be checked or detected. Modern education, however, with consistent opposition to the solid and useful, neglects these domestic acquirements no less than the cultivation of reason or method, and more than half the girls who spend hours daily with a needle in their hands, could not make a gown or cut out a shirt. This ignorance, together with the taste for fancy-work, is in great measure the cause of so much time being wasted; days are spent doing that which better skill and more judgment and method would have accomplished in a few hours. If these things are duly weighed, we believe that with care and management the cases are comparatively few in which any person in the station of a gentle woman is necessarily so reduced to the slavery of needlework, as to be obliged altogether to abandon higher pursuits. But if the plea of necessity is to be urged for tent-stitch, knitting, and crochet, or if novel-reading, gossip, shopping, and studying the fashions are to be dignified with the name of occupations, or ranked among those things by which women are expected to embellish domestic life and throw a grace over social intercourse, then we renounce the contest; and we can only add, that it is little to be wondered at, where it is so, that women still occupy a depressed station, and exercise a small part of the influence which should be theirs. It is well if, under such a weight of trifling, the very soul itself is not frittered away! We may conclude, then, that in the upper ranks of life a woman's domestic duties need not interfere with intellectual pleasures and pursuits. They may indeed preclude her from attaining any profound knowledge, but not from that amount of study necessary to train the powers of reflection and judgment, and to enable her to reap all the benefit mental cultivation confers on character. She has, in this respect, an advantage over most men who are engaged in business or in active professions, which leave them very little time for any pursuits of their own. Neither the care of children, nor any household occupations, are more alien from studious pursuits (while they require much less time and earnest attention) than the drudgery of a public office or a counting-house, or the drilling of a regiment. Yet it is not among professional men, but rather among those whose whole time is at their own disposal, that we find most ignorance and apathy to things beyond their own sphere. Their attainments may not be of the highest order, or their knowledge the most profound; this might be impossible amid the claims of business; but they find leisure, when they desire it, for sufficient mental cultivation to reap its best practical fruits, namely, habits of thought and reasoning, and the enlargement of views and interests reaching to a higher range of ideas and enjoyments than what belong to the routine of life. So likewise might women, if love of trifles did not interfere more than any necessary attention to trifling things which their position requires from them. This is the true root of the evil; frivolity, which is one of the moral defects fostered in women by want of mental training, is the real obstacle to their seeking higher attainments. The feeling with which a woman enters upon this subject may be compared to that with which one who loves his country, and is proud of her greatness and her beauty, is constrained to notice symptoms of decay in her institutions, or of corruption in her people, which cripple her energies and resources, exciting the pity of friends and the scorn of foes. Such is frivolity to women; the plague-spot on their moral constitution, the poison circulating through every vein of social and domestic life, by the pernicious influence of which, with its train of idleness and vanity, a greater number have sunk to moral degradation, if not into actual vice, than through the workings of passion. And more ignoble their fall, less worthy of sympathy or interest, for they have themselves frittered away their claims upon our feeling; they have with their own hands dug the grave of their own respectability. When we speak thus strongly of the frivolity of women, we are far from intending to infer that they alone are frivolous; and the frivolity of men is in some ways more pernicious still, as being exercised on a wider scale, carrying more weight from their more public position, and being also even more unblushingly exhibited, as we daily see in the case of those whose lives are devoted to hunting, racing, or yachting, and who sacrifice their fortunes and the interests of all belonging to them to such objects, without a consciousness of guilt, or a reproach from the world. There are too many such examples; but our business is not with them, and, moreover, it may well be doubted whether the number of frivolous men would have been what it is, had there been fewer frivolous mothers; whether, had they not breathed the corrupting atmosphere of frivolity in the early home from which the most lasting associations are derived, they would have betrayed it so contemptibly on a wider field. It should never be forgotten, that frivolity is no less inimical to good feeling than to intellect; from not considering it in this light, many persons are inclined to view it too indulgently. But of what depth or constancy of feeling, of what consistent kindness, can the thoughtless be capable?—and thoughtlessness is only one phase of frivolity. Well may the German poet say : Yea, he deserves to find himself deceived, All earnestness of character, all that makes life more than a passing show, this world more than the stage on which man "plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven, as make the angels weep," is incompatible with frivolity; and though we unfortunately see that it can to a certain degree coexist with moral and religious sentiment, it is merely when the conscience is so unenlightened as not to feel the anomaly, and the reason so little exercised as not to perceive the application of the sublime principles of religion to the lesser concerns of life. Devotional sentiment may preserve purity of feeling and intention, but the mind left uncultivated and vacant will be either exclusively occupied with trifles, or it will bring down to its own level of pettiness the really important and serious subjects to which its attentions may be forced. The latter is the worst result of the two, since frivolity carried into serious subjects is more injurious to character than when it is contented with things as frivolous as itself. If, then, women must gossip, it had better be of balls than of missionary meetings, of their neighbors' dress than of their religious opinions and differences; and if they must read without thinking, it had better be novels than sermons. By this means frivolity is at least kept within its own domain. The higher feelings and interests of human life are unprofaned by its intrusion, and we may still hope that the mind in which *Wallenstein, from Coleridge's translation. these have never been desecrated may yet be roused to feel their force, and be rescued by their influence from its earlier dream of folly. It would be well if women took this serious view of frivolity; for while they look upon the trivial occupations, the petty cares, the waste of time and of talent, to which this defect leads, as opposed merely to the intellectual pursuits, which occupy so secondary a place in their estimation, they consider it too much as a venial fault; whereas, if they remembered how often shallowness of mind and shallowness of heart go together, they would doubtless strive more earnestly to correct the former. Pursuits which require serious mental exertion, and absorb attention, are by their very nature most hostile to this fault; and it is this which makes them most desirable, in a position like that of women, commanding much leisure, but obliging considerable attention to trifling things; in other words, giving the widest scope to idleness, while providing just enough occupation to lull conscience to sleep, and to prevent the waste of time assuming a criminal appearance. Those pursuits, if earnestly followed whenever necessary cares or avocations allow it, will keep up mental activity in the midst of the merest drudgery of life; while, on the other hand, if inclination leads to trifles, however serious or elevated the studies to which the mind may forcibly be turned at stated times, it will lapse into frivolity at each return of leisure. This fact of the small influence exerted on the mind by obligatory, compared with voluntary occupation, is full of important consequences in its bearings upon daily life, and the formation of habits; and it deserves to be seriously considered by the young, who, just fresh from the guidance of others, are beginning to form their own plans of occupation. It is that earnestness and activity of mind, leading to the love of knowledge and to the anxious search for it, as far as our means will allow, which constitutes the striking difference we so often feel to exist between two persons whose actual attainments, whether high or low in themselves, are very much on a par. The one is satisfied and stagnant, the other active and aspiring; the one would remain a mere unreasoning machine, in the midst |