I cannot tell; but very different, doubtless, from ours. We have but to glance at here a page and there a page of the past records of the race, to feel quite sure that woman’s ideal man has varied much in the tide of time. Passing by prehistoric man, lest I wound the susceptibilities of such as claim that he never existed, and coming forward to the days of Homer, we must suppose that the sentimental daughters of the literary gentlemen of that day—the chiefs, to wit, who patronized the blind bard—for rhapsody divine bartering the prosaic but sustaining bacon—we must reckon it as probable that these young women yearned—if yearning were in vogue at that early period—yearned to be led from the parental roof by some Achilles of a youth, tall, broad-chested, agile as a panther, strong as a lion, with thews of steel, soul of adamant, eye of consuming fire. Juvenal, again, if we may pluck a leaf at random, tells us that, in his day, a sentimental married woman who would shriek at a mouse, let us say, was capable of braving the sea in a leaky old hulk, eloping with all that was left of a gladiator after twenty years’ hacking in the arena. And now, making a spring forward into the last quarter of the nineteenth century, we find the ideal of the upper ten dozen of New York society, for example, to be a nice young man who parts his hair and his name in the middle, leads in the “german”[1] and gets all his “things”[2] in London. [And this sufficed till but recently. Of late, however, as I read in the papers, the best society of New York has grown more exacting, and no one need now aspire to be looked upon as a lion—a knight without fear and without reproach—unless, after devoting for some years half his time and all his mind, as it were, to the art, he can “handle the reins” well enough to pass for a real stage-driver. The ’bus-drivers themselves, however, whimsically enough, are not held in half the estimation of their imitators and rivals (just as mock-turtle soup is deemed by many superior to the genuine decoction). They may actually be hired at two dollars a day, more or less, and seem positively glad to get that, being to all outward seeming entirely unconscious of the glamour attaching to their ennobling art.][3]