Year: 1874

Tormented by the pains of thinking,
1 have often envied the placid peace OF
those who cannot think at all. How
delightful it must be, 1 have said to
myself, to be able to hold the most
utterly contradictory views on all
things, divine and human, without the
faintest suspicion as to their inconsist-
ency, or any logical horror of inconsist-
ency itself Women, with occasional
exceptions, are not much troubled by
such inconsistencies. Are they, there
fore, less happy than men? How sooth-
ing it must be to be hopelessly incapable
of syllogisms What pangs is not a
mind spared that refuses to admit that
if A is B, and G is A, therefore G is also
B. What admirable wives and mothers
and daughters there are, and what
praiseworthy country parsons too, to
whom all this bepuzzlement about A,
B, and G, is as unintelligible as a con-
jurer's gibberish Supposing it were
suddenly proved that all our astrono-
mers are wrong, and that the sun really
goes round the earth, what horrible
agonies should We thinking people en-
dure who believe in mathematics and
the multiplication.table, and what q
hideous skepticism would darken the
rest of our lives Yet the unthinking
multitude would be unmoved by a single
painful thought, and would dress, dine,
digest, and sleep as unconcernedly as
if Copernicus and Newton had never
existed.


Then, again, there is that enviable
capacity for enjoying many things which
in my unfortunate state of culture, do
detest. never walk through an old
house, filed with eighteenth-century
furniture, without envying the simpli-
city and credulity of my ancestors.
How easily must that generation have
been pleased which saw beauty in those
spindle-legged chairs and tables, and
which could plaster up Gothic roof or
screen, and paint some venerable oak
carving a pale-blue color, and find itself
refreshed by the effect There are
limits, indeed, to ones envy of the non-
culture-I will not call it the barbarism
of the past. By no possible effort of
sympathy can / wish to feel as those
felt who delighted to contemplate King
George w., in his tight coat and silk
stockings, sitting upon his royal sofa,
with arm outstretched, as depicted by
Sir Thomas Lawrence.


As to the amount of happiness con-
nected with the mutabilities of ladies'
dress, on the other hand, my thoughts
are much exercised. Does it, or does it
not, add to the enjoyment of ones
whole life to be able to be equally de-
lighted with a mass of false hair of
reddish hue at the back of ones head,
and mass of false hair, made white
with powder, on the top of ones head,
and head without any false hair at all?
Take the whole amount of rapture
which one has ever experienced from
the contemplation of the Venus of Milo,
and consider whether it is equal, IL the
long-run, to the daily self-complacency
of the simple soul that is conscious of
being always clothed as fashion de-
mands, whether fashion prescribes four
and-twenty inches or three yards as the
diameter of her gown. l go, perhaps,
to gayly-dressed evening gathering,
where every woman, whether old or
young, is decolIetee, in varying degrees
OF exposure. What necks do L see
What shoulders What compilations
You are not those smiling creatures
happy, whose skins are as nearly as
possible the same color as their dresses ?
Is the enjoyment of that amiable female
marred by the thought that she has
clothed herself in hue which brings
out most forcibly the sad fact that time
is beginning its rayages upon her face
and arms? And are women generally
to be pitied because they are for the
most part unaware OF the fact that good
looking arms are not common, and that
arms which are not good-looking had
better be encased in some pleasant
looking sleeves than paraded before the
public gaze? These are difficult ques-
tions for him to settle who speculates
on the advantages of the culture Of to-
day.-COrnhiH.