of your friends.  Guard within your own breast, however you may long for the relief of giving a free vent to your feelings, any sorrows or any apprehensions that cannot be removed or obviated by their revelation.  Thus will you unite in yourself the combined advantages of the frivolous and intellectual; your society will be loved and sought after as much as that of the first can be, (only, however, by the wise and good—­my assertion extends no further,) and you will at the same time be respected, consulted, and imitated, as the clever and educated can alone be.

I have hitherto spoken only of the unmarried among your acquaintance:  let us now turn to the wives and mothers, and observe, with pity, the position of her, who, though she may be well and fondly loved, is felt at the same time to be incapable of bestowing sympathy or counsel.  It is indeed, perhaps, the wife and mother who is the best loved who will at the same time be made the most deeply to feel her powerlessness to appreciate, to advise, or to guide:  the very anxiety to hide from her that it is the society, the opinion, and the sympathy of others which is really valued, because it alone can be appreciative, will make her only the more sensibly aware that she is deficient in the leading qualities that inspire respect and produce usefulness.

She must constantly feel her unfitness to take any part in the society that suits the taste of her more intellectual husband and children.  She must observe that they are obliged to bring down their conversation to her level, that they are obliged to avoid, out of deference to, and affection for her, all those varied topics which make social intercourse a useful as well as an agreeable exercise of the mental powers, an often more improving arena of friendly discussion than perhaps any professed debating society could be.  No such employment of social intercourse can, however, be attempted when one of the heads of the household is uneducated and unintellectual.  The weather must form the leading, and the only safe topic of conversation; for the gossip of the neighbourhood, commented on in the freedom and security of family life, imparts to all its members a petty censoriousness of spirit that can never afterwards be entirely thrown off.  Then the education of the children of such a mother as I have described must be carried on under the most serious disadvantages.  Money in abundance may be at her disposal, but that is of little avail when she has no power of forming a judgment as to the abilities of the persons so lavishly paid for forming the minds of the children committed to their charge:  the precious hours of their youth will thus be very much wasted; and when self-education, in some few cases, comes in time to repair these early neglects, there must be reproachful memories of that ignorance which placed so many needless difficulties in the path to knowledge and advancement.