her?  Has she ever been enlightened as to the consequent unspeakable importance of personal character as the source of influence?  In a word, have any means, direct or indirect, prepared her for her duties?  No! but she is a linguist, a pianist, graceful, admired.  What is that to the purpose?  The grand evil of such an education is the mistaking means for ends; a common error, and the source of half the moral confusion existing in the world.  It is the substitution of the part for a whole.  The time when young women enter upon life, is the one point to which all plans of education tend, and at which they all terminate:  and to prepare them for that point is the object of their training.  Is it not cruel to lay up for them a store of future wretchedness, by an education which has no period in view but one; a very short one, and the most unimportant and irresponsible of the whole of life?  Who that had the power of choice would choose to buy the admiration of the world for a few short years with the happiness of a whole life? the temporary power to dazzle and to charm, with the growing sense of duties undertaken only to be neglected, and responsibilities the existence of which is discovered perhaps simultaneously with that of an utter inability to meet them?  Even if the mischief stopped here, it would be sufficiently great; but the craving appetite for applause once roused, is not so easily lulled again.  The moral energies, pampered by unwholesome nourishment,—­like the body when disordered by luxurious dainties,—­refuse to perform their healthy functions, and thus is occasioned a perpetual strife and warfare of internal principles; the selfish principle still seeking the accustomed gratification, the conjugal and maternal prompting to the performance of duty.  But duty is a cold word; and people, in order to find pleasure in duty, must have been trained to consider their duties as pleasures.  This is a truth at which no one arrives by inspiration!  And in this moral struggle, which, like all other struggles, produces lassitude and distaste of all things, the happiness of the individual is lost, her usefulness destroyed, her influence most pernicious.  For nothing has so injurious an effect on temper and manners, and consequently on moral influence, as the want of that internal quiet which can only arise from the accordance of duty with inclination.  Another most pernicious effect is, the deadening within the heart of the feeling of love, which is the root of all influence; for it is an extraordinary fact, that vanity acts as a sort of refrigerator on all men—­on the possessor of it, and on the observer.