Still, it would be ungenerous not to recognize that Mary Carpenter gave to the children of the poor not merely her learning, but her love. In early life, her biographer tells us, she had longed for the happiness of being a wife and a mother; but later she became content that her affection could be freely given to all who needed it, and the verse in the prophecies, ‘I have given thee children whom thou hast not borne,’ seemed to her to indicate what was to be her true mission. Indeed, she rather inclined to Bacon’s opinion, that unmarried people do the best public work. ‘It is quite striking,’ she says in one of her letters, ‘to observe how much the useful power and influence of woman has developed of late years. Unattached ladies, such as widows and unmarried women, have quite ample work to do in the world for the good of others to absorb all their powers. Wives and mothers have a very noble work given them by God, and want no more.’ The whole passage is extremely interesting, and the phrase ‘unattached ladies’ is quite delightful, and reminds one of Charles Lamb. _Mrs. Somerville_ and _Mary Carpenter_. By Phyllis Browne, Author of _What Girls Can Do_, _etc._ (Cassell and Co.) ARISTOTLE AT AFTERNOON TEA (_Pall Mall Gazette_, December 16, 1887.) In society, says Mr. Mahaffy, every civilized man and woman ought to feel it their duty to say something, even when there is hardly anything to be said, and, in order to encourage this delightful art of brilliant chatter, he has published a social guide without which no _débutante_ or dandy should ever dream of going out to dine. Not that Mr. Mahaffy’s book can be said to be, in any sense of the word, popular. In discussing this important subject of conversation, he has not merely followed the scientific method of Aristotle which is, perhaps, excusable, but he has adopted the literary style of Aristotle for which no excuse is possible. There is, also, hardly a single anecdote, hardly a single illustration, and the reader is left to put the Professor’s abstract rules into practice, without either the examples or the warnings of history to encourage or to dissuade him in his reckless career. Still, the book can be warmly recommended to all who propose to substitute the vice of verbosity for the stupidity of silence. It fascinates in spite of its form and pleases in spite of its pedantry, and is the nearest approach, that we know of, in modern literature to meeting Aristotle at an afternoon tea.