“No such thing, sir,” replies Corulea Scribbler, who is so very superior that she is momentarily expected to regenerate society singlehanded, “no such thing, sir! I know what the author means: he justly considers woman as a--that is, as _the_ concentrated essence of mind; nothing low, base, earthy--but--in fact--definitions should be terse--you’ll excuse my mathematical tastes, but--ahem!--three terms at Queen’s College, and that dear Professor Baa-lamb! naturally produce a logical habit of thought--you require a perfect woman.” “No, madam, I am not so unreasonable.” “I mean, you require a definition of a perfect woman; here you have it then--the maximum of mind united to the minimum of matter; or, to speak poetically, a ‘thing all soul.’” And having thus given her opinion, Miss Corulea, who measures barely five feet, and is as thin as a lath, shakes her straw-coloured ringlets and subsides into the Sixth Book of Euclid. But neither the red-jacket nor the blue-stocking, albeit each the type of a not unnumerous class, has exactly answered our question as we would wish it replied to. We do not agree with Charley Leicester in considering woman an angel; first, because our ideas with regard to angels are excessively vague and undefined, wings and white drapery being the only marked features which we have as yet succeeded in realising; and secondly, because, to verify the resemblance, woman should be faultless, and we have never yet met with one who had not some fascinating little sin left to show that she was not too good for this world. Our notion of a woman, in the best sense of the word, is a being fitted to be a helpmeet for man; and this would lead us into another disquisition, which we will dismiss summarily by stating that we mean a man worthy of the name, not an ape in a red-coat like Ensign Downylip, or an owl in a sad-coloured one like Professor Baalamb, but a man whom it would not be mere satire to call a lord of the creation. A helpmeet for such an one as this should possess a clear, acute intellect, or she would be unable to comprehend his aspirations after the good, and true, and beautiful--the efforts of his fallen nature to regain somewhat of its original rank in the scale of created beings. She should have a faithful, loving heart, that when, foiled in his worldly career, his spirit is dark within him, and in the bitterness of his soul he confesses that “the good that he would he does not, but the evil he would not, that he does,” her affection may prove to him that in her love he has one inestimable blessing yet remaining, of which death alone can deprive him, and then only for a season; for, availing herself of the fitting moment with the delicate tact which is one of the brightest instincts of a loving woman’s heart, she can offer him the only true consolation, by urging him to renew his Christian warfare in the hope that _together_ they may attain the reward of their high calling, a