If any person imagine that the sobriety I have been recommending would render young women moping or gloomy, he is much mistaken, for the contrary is the fact. I have uniformly found--and I began to observe it in my very childhood--that your jovial souls, men or women, except when over the bottle, are of all human beings the most dull and insipid. They can no more exist--they may _vegetate_--but they can no more _live_ without some excitement, than a fish could live on the top of the Alleghany. If it be not the excitement of the bottle, it must be that of the tea or the coffee cup, or food converted into some unwholesome form or other by condiments; or if it be none of these, they must have some excitement of the intellect, for intemperance is not confined to the use of condiments and poisons for the body; there are condiments and poisons to mind and heart. In fact, they usually accompany each other. Show me a person who cannot live on plain and simple food and the only drink the Creator ever made, and as a general rule you will show me a person to whom the plain and the solid and the useful in domestic, social, intellectual, and moral life are insipid if not disgusting. 'They are welcome to all that sort of labor,' said one of these creatures--not rationals--this very day, to me, in relation to plain domestic employments.--Show me a female, as many, alas! very many in fashionable life are now trained, and you show me a person who has none of the qualities that fit her to be a help meet for man in a life of simplicity. She could recite well at the high school, no doubt; but the moment she leaves school, she has nothing to do, and is taught to do nothing. I have seen girls, of this description, and they may be seen by others. But what is such a female--one who can hardly help herself--good for, at home or abroad; married, or single? The moment she has not some feast, or party, or play, or novel, or--I know not what--something to keep up a fever, the moment I say that she has not something of this sort to anticipate or enjoy, that moment she is miserable. Wo to the young man who becomes wedded for life to a creature of this description. She may stay at home, for want of a better place, and she may add one to the national census every ten years, but a companion, or a mother, she cannot be. I should dislike a moping melancholy creature as much as any man, though were I tied to such a thing, I could live with her; but I never could enjoy her society, nor but half of my own. He is but half a man who is thus wedded, and will exclaim, in a literal sense, 'When shall I be delivered from the body of this death?'