to have taste in dress for the benefit of others, and to dress well herself for her own self-respect, and to be so far independent in her own circumstances, that she need never accept an invitation because it is convenient to do so, or give her entertainer the notion he is conferring a pecuniary favour.

There are persons in the position of old maids who ought not fairly to be classed among them-where for instance, there has been an engagement of sufficient standing to test the reality and constancy of affection, and that surrender of will and independence into another's keeping, which constitutes the sentiment of marriage. Nor does the woman who remains single for the sake of father or brother, who shares his interests and his confidences, come quite under the category. Her intellectual relations with man are rather after the conjugal type; she escapes many of the bitternesses of woman left to herself, and, on the other hand, she is less mistress of herself.

The unamiable old maid is too stock a character in satire and fiction to need analysis here. We doubt much whether a spiteful old maid is not best as she is. Spitefulness, as a quality, is not engendered by celibacy; it belongs to the character, and is to be found quite as venomous in married life, where perhaps it does more mischief. An ill-natured mother perpetuates herself in narrow, illiberal, gossiping children. Not, of course, that the unrestrained talk that idle women sometimes allow themselves -the brooding over the doings of friends, relations, and neighbours does not often issue in unfair judgments and worse things, but it does equally so with men. False rumours and scandalous reports, the devising evil and the pleasure in listening to it, the whole brood of malignancy,

own no sex. It is the lesser power in women to find issue for their execrations, constituting them objects of contempt, which has fastened the epithet spiteful on the spinster. What, perhaps, the single life is often answerable for, is the chatter in which some women pass their lives. We suppose that nothing can equal the dilution to which human converse may be reduced, by two women spending their lives together with nothing to do. The flux of words, the repetitions, the perpetual harpings on worn-out topics, set off by a forced cheerfulness, which keeps up the flow, as it were, to prove to themselves and outsiders that they are content with their condition, finds no parallel elsewhere. Mothers and wives can't help having some business to be attended to. Single women often have no obvious duties that the world can lay its finger upon. They can only talk.

There have been a great many speculations on the number, large and increasing, of the class which has been our topic. We have no doubt that growing refinement is one great cause of this increase. In the working classes, where congeniality of tastes is little thought of, an old maid is a rarity, though the proportions of the sexes must be the same. Marriage even among the less fastidious of a higher class, cannot now be owned the one object of life, as it was understood to be on all hands a hundred and fifty years ago. Could an author of Addison's standard of delicacy report an offer of marriage in this day as he does with such hearty approval, where the young gentleman, after paying his court to the haughty beauty, and getting only severe looks and distant civilities for his pains, turns to her plain sister Daphne, and with the preliminary that he has something

as

to say to her that he hopes she would be pleased with, begins, "Faith, Daphne, I'm in love with thee, and despise thy sister immensely!" Daphne laughs, but snaps at the proposal, while the father congratulates himself on the turn of affairs, having now no care but for his beauty, which he thought he could carry to market at his leisure. "I do not know anything," the author good-naturedly adds, "that has pleased me so much a great while this conquest of friend my Daphne's." In the fragment of a story-"The Watsons"-lately published in The Life of Jane Austen,' is a conversation on this subject between two sisters, which indicates the advance of feeling, the awakening to a higher sense of the relation of marriage which intellectual pursuits were bringing about in Miss Austen's own day. We see this growing nicety at once through the authoress and her characters. The passage altogether is as true to nature as happily expressed, as distinctively marked by her peculiar vein as anything she committed to publicity; but something in it shocked her sense of dignity or refinement. She would not let a woman she cared for commit herself to the sentiment expressed. It was true to life, but she did not care to betray it. It is where the elder sister, who personates the lower view of marriage, remarks upon the younger girl's refine ment as an unfamiliar quality acquired away from her natural homeas a romantic sentiment sure to militate against the solid practical happiness of life. Elizabeth, the elder, had been confiding to Emma, the younger, the disappointment of her life. A certain Tom Purvis had at one time paid her great attention, till the arts of a second sister, Penelope, had driven him from her-arts futile as regards the treacherous sister, but

"You do not know Penelope. There nothing she would not do to get married. She would as good as tell you so herself. Do not trust her with any secrets of your own; take warning by me, do not trust her she has her good qualities, but she has no faith, no honour, no scruples, if she can promote I wish with all her own advantage. I demy heart she was well married. clare I had rather have her well married than myself!'

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Than yourself! yes, I can suppose So. A heart wounded like yours can have little inclination for matrimony!

"Not much indeed-but you know we must marry.'

"I could do very well single for my own part.'

ball now and then, would be enough "A little company and a pleasant for me, if one could be young for ever; but my father cannot provide for us, and it is very bad to grow old and be poor and laughed at. I have lost Purvis, it is true; but very few people marry their first loves. I should not refuse a man because he was not Purvis. Not that I can ever quite forgive Penelope.'

"Emma shook her head in acquiescence."

Penelope, Elizabeth goes on to She tell her, has her troubles too. is supposed to be trying to make a match at Chichester, with a rich old Dr. Harding, but she keeps her own counsel, saying, truly enough, "Too many cooks spoil the broth."

"I am sorry for her anxieties,' said Emma, but I do not like her plan or her opinions. I shall be afraid of ber. She must have too masculine and bold a temper. To be so bent on marriage, to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation, is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil; but to a woman of edu

cation and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. I would rather be a teacher in a school (and I can think

This is what education and a more refined public opinion have done for women: they have enlarged their perception of disagreeable men, and taught them to prefer their own company to the society of the vulgar, ill-tempered, or illiterate. They do not lay themselves out to please such men as indeed the Penelopes shown up by the fragment will always do, but not such women as the Elizabeth who utters these sentiments. It is clearly less intolerable to woman to be an old maid than it has been; the single life for her has never had such a "good time" as now; and as this fact becomes patent, certain prevalent characteristics open to unfavourable criticism may become modified, softened, or even disappear altogether. The time may even come when you will not detect an old maid with her gloves on, but the era is probably far distant. It cannot be denied that marriage so far is a finer school for manner than celibacy. No manner can be excellent that is not self-pos

sessed; but self-possession needs in ordinary intercourse, for its perfect expression, the double consciousness of self-respect and an acknowledged position. Manner is a complex product. As old Massey says, there are two sorts of opinion-the opinion a man has of himself, and the opinion the world has of him. The wife is at one with the world; she feels herself a citizeness, a transmitter of its traditions. The old maid knows herself in the world's eye a cipher

her self-possession wants the world's backing. In some it degenerates into self-assertion, and in The marmany it fails altogether. ried woman can take herself for granted. Society interferes with this ease of assurance in the single woman; hence the liveliness, the allusions, the consciousness of some manners, or, in fear of these errors, the self-restraint, the stiffness, the conventional rigidity. A good manner perfects itself towards early middle life. It takes its highest polish where the woman has a fixed present and future-she has "settled," in homely phrase. But whatever a woman's own state of feeling, no woman has settled in the world's eye until she has married, or is past speculating upon, and her ways are moulded by habit into the form they must keep to the end.

Marriage may be regarded in two aspects, -as gaining a congenial companion for life, or offering a basis of operations. Holding the one view, a woman is much more likely to end her life single than in the other. There is much to be said for both views. The woman who feels powers and impulses in herself that a single life would allow no field for, does not deserve our censure for accepting what she holds to be a call towards the duties to which she feels herself born, though she has to arrive at them through a medi

um accepted as such, rather than as offered as a perfect marriage of two minds. A woman may accept a worthy man for a husband though she is not in love with him. The Bible nowhere bids her look about, or even wait, for the best man. It asserts principles, and leaves them to operate; but it regards marriage under what we will call the sensible view-that which consolidates states and families. Sentiment is left to evolve itself gradually as man advances in refinement. Of these two classes of women, the one that marries respectably is called by the consent of mankind fortunate; the one that misses her ideal, or from any cause remains unchosen, is assumed "the less fortunate of her sex." Nor is the epithet misapplied, as certainly she is endowed with fewer of the gifts of fortune than her wedded sister. But this difference is one apt very sensibly to diminish with years. Whatever the advantages of the bride, the balance of the account may very likely be on the other side at fifty or three score. Many an old maid blesses her lot as she compares it with that of her mar

ried compeers, and sees what the gay husbands of their youth have turned into under the attrition of yearssees them in all the helplessness, peevishness, and exacting discontent of unwelcome, unlovely old age. She speculates perhaps on the shortlived nature of attraction. Two young people meet, bright, youthful, debonair; a sense of fitness strikes not head but fancy. If they are thrown much together, the fancy matures into a liking from mere propinquity; and so these people, with little really in common, have come to pass their lives together, and are now wearing them out in contact rather than agreement. She recalls, perhaps, similar encounters in her youth to which circumstance and occasion did not lend their aid. Chance brings before her some transient fancy of her girlhood, and she shudders to think what might have been! Compensation, that great harmoniser of lots, and rectifier of fortune's caprices, has no wider field, no greater triumphs, than in equalising the amount of happiness in the two states of life we have been discussing.

THAT the Ministry should be able to keep their battered craft afloat at all, after so many disasters, is proof that the political situation is exceptional. Government is not certain of support on any question whatever. It does not know how to gauge the disposition of its nominal supporters, and often finds itself suddenly and unexpectedly deserted. The progress of business has been lamentably slow. And yet the helpless rulers are able to retain office, presenting a problem not to be solved in very few words. They, of course, will keep their places as long as they can, unabashed by the mistrust with which they are regarded; and the explanation of their continuance must be looked for in the dispositions of others. The Opposition, as is well known, is not eager for office, does not press the Ministry, and leaves to it the task of destroying itself, which, considering the strength with which it was weighted when it came into office, it can hardly do much faster than it is doing. But the manner in which the Liberal party manifests its dissatisfaction with the Government by sudden outbreaks of rebellion, but without a steady endeavour to subvert it, is the peculiar feature of the case. There is no open marshalling of a Liberal force against it; but somehow majorities are given to the Opsition fitfully, the Government being ostentatiously supported in the intervals between them. To explain this it is necessary to look not only at the mistakes and wilfulness which have rendered some of the defeats inevitable, but also at the way in which systems of general spoliation and disturbance cannot fail to operate. It is, we fear,

It

but too much the custom of human nature to find something in the condition of others which may be thought too easy, or too profitable, or too honourable for them. seems entirely reasonable that our neighbour should be a little circumscribed in his gains, his enjoyments, or the advantages of his position. It will do him good, poor man, to take him down a little; and if this can be done under shelter of the law, every one must see how just and proper it is to do it. So, when we hear that the spoiler-general is taking account of our neighbour's emoluments, habits, &c., we recognise a course which we had long foreseen to be inevitable. Neither are we much startled when we hear that another neighbour, and another, and another, is to be weighed and pinched to see how fat he is; they really could not expect that things could go on much longer as they had been going for some time past, and the spoiler-general would have been greatly to blame if he had shut his eyes to what had been apparent to us, alas! only too long. One fine day, however, we hear that we ourselves are to be put into the scale, and of course our first inclination is to laugh at a thing so absurd. Everybody knows how overworked and underpaid we are, under what disabilities we labour, and, in short, not to mince matters, everybody agrees that our deserts entitle us to very much more than we receive. The spoiler-general-pshaw! stuff!! Besides, haven't we always given hin our hearty and powerful support when he was down upon our neighbours, and so established an irresistible claim upon his forbear. ance?-pshaw! stuff!! we say again. But once more we hear that we are