little experience of the world and modern life. Idle gossip and questionable conversation are freely indulged in before them as a legitimate source of amusement by their mothers and their mothers' friends. The doubtful topics of the day are not only discussed in their presence, but discussed without reserve in a mixed assemblage of both sexes. The worst novels of the season lie on the drawing-room table, dogs'-eared at the strong passages; and the daily papers, whatever their contents, are passed freely from hand to hand. Women of advanced views make the drawing-room their forum, where they declaim with alarming minuteness of detail against the iniquities of men, and insist on the need there is of women meeting them on their own ground, with weapons sharpened at the same grindstone. Things which our grandmothers went down to the grave without knowing are discussed in the light of day, and in unmistakable terms, before our unmarried girls; and of all the feminine qualities, shame, delicacy, and reticence are the first to be discarded. The tree of knowledge — that upas-tree of modern times — overshadows us all alike, and the sweetnesses of womanhood droop and die beneath its poisonous shade. Medical studies carried on in company with men; the country stumped in advocacy of woman's rights, which mean nothing more nor less than the revolution of society and violence done to nature; the country stumped too on questions which no woman who respected herself should touch with her little finger — what chance have our girls nowadays? Born, bred, and fostered in a vitiated atmosphere from first to last, can we wonder if men say sorrowfully that the English girl of tradition is a thing of the past, and if their apologists can find nothing better as an excuse than that they are like so many boys, with no harm in them, but no womanhood? For ourselves, we hold to the expediency of ignorance of some matters — ignorance of vice, of the darker facts of human history, of the filthy byways of life, of the seething under-current beneath the tranquil surface of society. We see no good to come of the early initiation of children into the knowledge that belongs properly to maturity, of the participation of women in that which belongs properly to men alone. We think that there is a charm in maiden innocence, in womanly ignorance, which no amount of bold trafficking in the secret verities of life can make up for, and we grieve to see the small account at which these old-fashioned qualities are reckoned. For eating of the tree of knowledge Adam and Eve were flung out of paradise, and perhaps the analogy holds good for the children of men at the present day.
THE ART OF LUXURY.
There is a luxury of the senses and a luxury of the imagination. The ancients — that is, the Greeks, Romans, and Scriptural races — understood both perfectly; but our direct ancestors did not. The ancients began with their cities, making them by their magnificence tempting to the very strangers whom they pretended to exclude. It is enough, however, to name Babylon, Athens, and Rome; for further expatiation would give an historical tinge to that which is designed as pure philosophy. For the same reason is rejected, though not so peremptorily, that volume of anecdote which has its alpha in Cleopatra's pearl, and its omega in poor Jack eating a five-pound note in a sandwich at Wapping. Most of these stories are apocryphal, and they do not represent the true spirit of luxury. But, in order that a subject may be made interesting, it is essential to take all the traditions with it, and spill the grain of salt. Let us believe, then, in everything that Tacitus and Suetonius tell; in the barbaric indulgences of Nero, Commodus, Heliogabalus, and the un-Cæsaric Cæsars: for they are quite as easy to comprehend as the black broth of Sparta, and the boiled peas which the monks of old used to put in their shoes. How much is this world the happier for doubting whether Apicius ate the tongues of nightingales; that Lucullus sent to the Danube for a trout when he dined cum Lucullo; that Sardanapalus was fanned night and day by fifty virgins; or that the ladies of Lesbos slept on roses whose perfume had been artificially heightened? What should we do for illustrations to dress dull topics into gaiety, had the chroniclers been silent as Syrian bishops upon these decorative additions to history? It is very pleasant to think that court maidens once powdered their hair with gold, as the Merovingian kings most certainly powdered their beards; that a famous Venetian gentleman, who affected rather than felt a love of the arts, had his pictures uncovered one by one to the sound of slow music, like a murder on the stage; that Lord Berkeley's shaving-
