It is better for you to pass an evening once or twice a week in a lady’s drawing-room, even though the conversation is slow, and you know the girl’s song by heart, than in a club, tavern, or the pit of a theatre. All amusements of youth to which virtuous women are not admitted, rely on it, are deleterious to their nature. All men who avoid female society have dull perceptions and are stupid, or have gross tastes and revolt against what is pure. Your club-swaggerers, who are sucking the butts of billiard-cues all night, call female society insipid. Poetry is uninspiring to a yokel; beauty has no charms for a blind man; music does not please a poor beast who does not know one tune from another; but as a true epicure is hardly ever tired of water, sancey, and brown bread and butter, I protest I can sit for a whole night talking to a well-regulated, kindly woman about her girl Fanny or her boy Frank, and like the evening’s entertainment. One of the great benefits a man may derive from woman’s society is, that he is bound to be respectful to her. The habit is of great good to your moral men, depend upon it. Our education makes of use the most eminently selfish men in the world. We fight for ourselves, we push for ourselves, we yawn for ourselves, we light our pipes and say we won’t go out, we prefer ourselves and our ease; and the greatest that comes to a man from a woman’s society is, that he has to think of somebody to whom he is bound to be constantly attentive and respectful.—_Thackeray._ Every virtue enjoined by Christianity as a virtue, is recommended by politeness as an accomplishment. Gentleness, humility, deference, affability, and a readiness to assist and serve on all occasions, are as necessary in the composition of a true Christian as in that of a well-bred man. Passion, moroseness, peevishness, and supercilious self-sufficiency, are equally repugnant to the characters of both, who differ in this only, that the true Christian really is what the well-bred man pretends to be, and would still be better bred if he was.—_Soame Jenyns._ --------------------- Footnote 120: Jeremy Taylor. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Spirit of the Age. ---------------------------- PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE. THE zeal which Albert, Prince Consort, evinced in furthering good works,—his sympathy with the wants of the poor, their bodily health and comfort, and their intellectual and moral culture,—will long endear his memory to the grateful people of the country of his adoption.