where it does not exist as a natural instinct, it is taught as the first principle of good manners, and considered as the universal passport to good society.
Nor can this, the greatest charm of female character, if totally neglected in youth, ever be acquired in after life. When the mind has been accustomed to what is vulgar, or gross, the fine edge of feeling is gone, and nothing can restore it. It is comparatively easy, on first entering upon life, to maintain the page of thought unsullied, by closing it against every improper image; but when once such images are allowed to mingle with the imagination, so as to be constantly revived by memory, and thus to give their tone to the habitual mode of thinking and conversing, the beauty of the female character may indeed be said to be gone, and its glory departed.
But we will no longer contemplate so unlovely—so unnatural a picture. Woman, happily for her, is gifted by nature with a quickness of perception, by which she is able to detect the earliest approach of anything which might tend to destroy that high-toned purity of character, for which, even in the days of chivalry, she was more reverenced and adored, than for her beauty itself. This quickness of perception in minute and delicate points, with the power which woman also possesses of acting upon it instantaneously, has, in familiar phraseology, obtained the name of tact; and when this natural gift is added to good taste, the two combined are of more value to a woman in the social and domestic affairs of every-day life, than the most brilliant intellectual endowments could be without them.
When a woman is possessed of a high degree of tact, she sees, as if by a kind of second-sight, when any little emergency is likely to occur; or when, to use a more familiar expression, things do not seem likely to go right. She
