There are comparatively few mothers qualified to give their daughters such an education, especially in our own country; for comparatively few have received such an education themselves, or are able fully to appreciate its importance. They can find little help in the fashionable boarding-schools for finishing young ladies; and in general these schools only aggravate the evil to be cured. The best and the only respectable schools for daughters that we have in the country are the conventual schools taught by women consecrated to God, and specially devoted to the work of education. These schools, indeed, are not always all that might be wished. {156} The good religious sometimes follow educational traditions perhaps better suited to the social arrangements of other countries than of our own, and sometimes underrate the value of intellectual culture. They do not always give as solid an intellectual education as the American woman needs, and devote a disproportionate share of their attention to the cultivation of the affections and sentiments, and to exterior graces and accomplishments. The defects we hint at are not, however, wholly, nor chiefly, their fault; they are obliged to consult, in some measure, the tastes and wishes of parents and guardians, whose views for their daughters and wards are not always very profound, very wise, very just, or very Christian. The religious cannot, certainly, supply the place of the mother in giving their pupils that practical home training so necessary, and which can be given only by mothers who have themselves been properly educated; but they go as far as is possible in remedying the defects of the present generation of mothers, and in counteracting their follies and vain ambitions. With all the faults that can be alleged against any of them, the conventual schools, even as they are, it must be conceded, are infinitely the best schools for daughters in the land, and, upon the whole, worthy of the high praise and liberal patronage their devotedness and disinterestedness secure them. We have seldom found their graduates weak and sickly sentimentalists. They develop in their pupils a cheerful and healthy tone, and a high sense of duty; give them solid moral and religious instruction; cultivate successfully their moral and religious affections; refine their manners, purify their tastes, and send them out feeling that life is serious, life is earnest, and resolved always to act under a deep sense of their personal responsibilities, and meet whatever may be their lot with brave hearts and without murmuring or repining.