There is scarcely any thing in the history of women more touching than the homage paid to beauty by those who have it not. No slave among her throng of adorers appreciated more keenly the beauty of Récamier than the skeleton-like, irritable Madame De Chateaubriand. The loveliness of a rival eats into a girl’s heart like corrosion; every fair curling hair, every grace of outline, is traced in lines of fire on the mind of the plainer one, and reproduced with microscopic fidelity. It is a woman’s business to be beautiful. She recommends every virtue and heroism by the grace which sets them forth. Women of genius are the first to lay the crown of womanhood on the head of the most beautiful. Mere fashion of face and form are not meant by beauty, but that symmetry and brightness which come of physical and spiritual refinement. Such are the heroines of Scott, Disraeli, and Bulwer, as inspiring as they are rare. Toward such ideals all women yearn. Who will say that this most natural feeling of the feminine heart may not have some fulfillment in the first thirty years of life? This limit is given because the latest authorities in social science assert that woman’s prime of youth is twenty-six, moving the barriers a good ten years ahead from the old standard of the novelist, whose heroines are always in the dew of sixteen. In the very first place, one may boldly say that beauty, or rather fascination, is not a matter of youth, and no woman ought to sigh over her years till she feels the frost creeping into her heart. Men of the world understand well that a woman’s wit is finest, and her heart yields the richest wealth, when experience has formed the fair and colorless material of youth. A sweet girl of seventeen and a high-bred beauty of thirty, if well preserved, may dispute the palm. I do not mean to decry rose-buds and dew. One hardly knows which to love them for most--their loveliness or their briefness. But women who look their thirties in the face should not lay down the sceptre of life, or fancy that its delights for them are over. They are young while they seem young. Then we may boldly set about renovating the outward form, sure that Nature will respond to our efforts. The essence of beauty is health; but all apparently healthy people are not fair. The type of the system must be considered in treatment. The brunette is usually built up of much iron, and the bilious secretion is sluggish. The blonde is apt to be dyspeptic, and subject to disturbances of the blood. From these causes result freckles, pimples, and that coarse, indented skin _stippled_ with punctures, like the tissue of pig-skin--a fault of many otherwise clear complexions.