ward making her so. Those hopeless, shrinking souls, alive with devotion and imagination, with hearts as fit to make passionate and worshiped lovers, or steadfast and inspiring heroines, as the fairest Venus of the sex, need not for an instant believe there is no alleviation for their case, no chance of making face and figure more attractive and truer exponents of the spirit within.
There is scarcely any thing in the history of women more touching than the homage paid to beauty by those who have it not. No slave among her throng of adorers appreciated more keenly the beauty of Récamier than the skeleton-like, irritable Madame De Chateaubriand. The loveliness of a rival eats into a girl's heart like corrosion; every fair curling hair, every grace of outline, is traced in lines of fire on the mind of the plainer one, and reproduced with microscopic fidelity. It is a woman's business to be beautiful. She recommends every virtue and heroism by the grace which sets them forth. Women of gen-
