and striving to find in the wine-cup, the satisfaction that our inner nature craves, trying to feed a soul, hungry for the beauties and perfections of the invisible world, with the poisonous food of sensuality. Let us say to it with Shakspeare, "O thou invisible spirit of wine, If thou hast no name to be known by Let us call thee 'devil.'" And lest these words betray any of the personal indignation that suggests itself at the moment the reflections upon such lives are indulged in, the voice of this same great poet ran be heard again telling in his emphatic terms, "I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, The knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful porcupine." But we have only to look around us intelligently to find the secret out ourselves. Society is at the acme of sensuality; it has reached the strangest antithetical condition. It is degraded in its excessive refinement; it is coarse and repulsive in its cultivation, it is ignorant in its enlightenment. Necessarily all this is the effect of a cause, but such a pitiful cause! The total wreck of man's best element. The once individual corruption has spread its fearful contagion until it has become universal; falsehood is disguised in truth, vice in virtue, and fraud and diplomacy in honesty. If women are expected to live in blissful ignorance of this movement, that expectation is a crowning audacity, for woman's life is destined to be one of action, and she will not sacrifice her noble mission through purely human motives. She means to save her brother, her lover, her husband, her son, even if the effort includes the forfeiture of her title of woman in the eyes of society. Thus it is, we have been persuaded into an unpremeditated leniency towards the sterner sex, blotting out the pictures of their vicious lives, not indeed to spare them in the very least, but only to save the blush, the sigh, the tear of many a woman whose heart is nigh enough to breaking without a stronger hand striking the last blow in the cruel work of laying bare the awful, the contemptible reality which fills their lives with bitterness and heart-burnings.