Girls learn drawing and painting at school, and these are amongst the numerous subjects on which the present writer is entitled to no technical or critical opinion. But he sometimes supposes that a painting is not necessarily the worse because it represents a noble thing, and that it may even be a worthier human occupation to portray the visage of a living man or woman than the play of light upon a dead wall or a dead partridge. It might even be argued by the wholly inexpert that if the business of art is with beauty, the art is higher, other things being equal, in proportion as the beauty it portrays is of a higher order. Thus in the painting of women, the ignorant commentator sometimes asks himself in what supreme sense it was worth while for an artist to expend his powers upon the portrait of some society fool who could pay him twelve hundred pounds therefor; or in what supreme sense a painter can be called an artist who prefers such a task, and the flesh-pots, to the portrayal of womanhood at its highest. There are attributes of womanhood which directly serve human life, present and to come--attributes of vitality and faithfulness, attributes of body and bosom, of mind and of feeling, which it is within the power of the great artist to portray; and it is in worthily portraying the greatest things, and in this alone, that he transcends the status of the decorator. It is worth while also to refer here to sculpture; something can be taught by its means. The Venus of Milo is not only a great work of art; it is also a representation of the physiological ideal. Its model was a woman eminently capable of motherhood. The corset is beyond question undesirable from every point of view, and it may be of service by means of such a statue as this to teach the girl's eye what are the right proportions of the body. She is constantly being faced with gross and preposterous perversions of the female figure as they are to be seen in the fashion plates of every feminine journal. It is as well that she should have opportunities of occasionally seeing something better.