Her kirtle should be of clean constance,

Lacit with lesured love;

The mailies of continuance

For never to remove.

Her sleeves should be of esperance,

To keep her fra despair;

Her glovis of good governance,

To hide her fingers fair.

Her shoon should be of sickerness,
In sign that she nought slide;
Her hose of honesty, I guess

I should for her provide.

Would she put on this garment gay,
I durst swear by my seill,

That she wore never green nor gray,

That set her half so weel.

Robert Henryson.

Duties of.

The modest virgin, the prudent wife, or the careful matron, are much more serviceable in life than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines, or virago queens. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice, and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than ladies described in romance, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from the quiver of their eyes.

Goldsmith.

Her strong Sense of Duty.

Home they brought her warrior dead;
She nor swoon'd, nor utter'd cry;

All her maidens, watching, said,
"She must weep or she will die."

Then they praised him, soft and low,
Call'd him worthy to be loved,

Truest friend and noblest foe;

Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stept,
Took a face-cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Rose, a nurse of ninety years,

Set his child upon her knee—
Like summer tempest came her tears-
"Sweet my child, I live for thee."

Tennyson.

H

Eccentricity Unbecoming.

Eccentricity in women is totally out of character. Neither genius, nor wit, nor generosity, nor even honesty, can make up for it; so peculiarly does the real power of a woman depend upon her power of pleasing, and so exclusively does that depend upon softness. Never was there such a mistake as when a female supposes that eccentricity can do more than amuse; that it should attract or inspire that fondness, that devotion of heart, which alone is love, which forms at once the pride of woman and the happiness of man. If woman was "Heaven's last best gift, the ever new delight of man, it was because of her gentleness. That is properly the "strong enforcement" of the sex.

Ward.

Economy her best Virtue.

Let men say what they will; according to the experience I have learned, I require in married women the economical virtue above all other virtues.

Fuller.

Her Economy and Benevolence.

prayers.

As free her alms—as diligent her cares;
As loud her praises, and as warm her
Yet was she not profuse; but fear'd to waste,
And wisely managed, that the stock might last ;
That all might be supplied, and she not grieve,
When crowds appear'd, she had not to relieve: