called, by way of pre-eminence, "fashionable schools." I do not mean to say that the extirpation of moral and religious principle is really the object there aimed at. No, far from it; for I dare affirm that many of the persons thus busily engaged, perhaps the whole of them, really believe that they are fast accomplishing a very great and good work. But the sum and substance of it, when stript of all its vain illusions, is nothing more nor less, in fact, than a very laborious and excessively expensive process to unfit the unfortunate subjects of it for every kind of life but such as they are taught to lead at school; _and that is_, to value all merely external acquirements far above every moral qualification, and to seek their chief happiness in the amount of admiration they can procure for these very superficial and comparatively worthless attainments. They come forth admirably prepared for a life of alternate excitement and gratification; but for the real Christian life of self-control, self-denial, and humble righteousness, they probably have not so much as heard of it, unless perchance when they have gone to church. They can use their hands, feet and eyes most exquisitely in attracting admiration; but when compelled to apply themselves to any of the homely, but really essential purposes of life, they find themselves most sadly embarrassed, if not utterly at a loss how to proceed. Are the poor girls to blame for all this? Far from it; they must have been something more or less than human beings to turn out differently. The fault--nay, I must call it the crime--if such misapplication of the talents which God has given them for far different purposes be criminal, lies chiefly at the parent's door. _But for them_ there would be no such course of Education in the world. It is indeed a course which prepares them admirably for what may truly be called _public life_; instead of qualifying them to adorn that which is almost entirely private and domestic--that in which an immense majority of females are destined to live and to die. What is the consequence of this incongruity--this manifest disagreement between the matters taught, and the ends to which they must generally be applied? What is the aptitude of the means to the great purposes which parents should aim to accomplish? Are they favorable or not to domestic happiness? If music, drawing, dressing, and dancing, with a smattering of some living foreign language, garnished with a few beggarly elements of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Geology, and Botany, are the principal ingredients in _this happiness_, then are the chief pursuits of fashionable female Education eminently calculated to promote it. But if the following view from one of our most distinguished moral and religious writers of what female Education _should be_, has any truth or justice in it, our prevalent systems of fashionable Education exhibit a most lamentable deficiency in almost all essential points.