whole science of music; their sympathies and comprehension can go no further. To many, again, _music_ stands for comic songs and Christy’s Minstrels. If an instrumental piece takes more than five minutes to get through, people begin to shift their feet and whisper to their neighbors; of course, when it is over, they will turn round and sweetly simper: “Oh! do play us something more; that last was _so_ lovely.” In ninety‐nine out of a hundred houses where you are doomed for your sins to hear music, you hear trash. It is hardly worth criticising, either in the choice or in the execution, and, one would therefore think, hardly worth telling a lie for. And yet this conventional admiration, what is it but a lie pure and simple? To return to our belles and their murdered home‐life. Not only is their time so mortgaged that they have none left for the joys of the family hearth, but they have none to spare for self‐culture. A woman’s education does not close on the threshold of the school‐room. Every advance made later by voluntary application to study is a greater stride than all the compulsory teaching she receives in her school‐life. If society materially interferes with this self‐development, it has a heavy responsibility to bear. Each mind thus stunted, crude, and unevenly balanced reduces the sum total of usefulness in this world, and adds to the dead‐weight of shiftless beings whose room would be decidedly better than their company in the scheme of human advancement. A frivolous, fashionable man or woman is a monster upon earth, a being whom nature certainly does not recognize, and whom religion reprobates.