standard, which is nature's, and that next to the highest, which is art's.
George Eliot speaks of that fine polish which is "the expensive substitute
for simplicity," and Tennyson says of manners,--

"Kind nature's are the best: those next to best
That fit us like a nature second-hand;
Which are indeed the manners of the great."

In our own national history we have learned to recognize that the personal
demeanor of women may be a social and political force. The slave-power owed
much of its prolonged control at Washington, and the larger part of its
favor in Europe, to the fact that the manners of Southern women had been
more sedulously trained than those of Northern women. Even
at this moment, one may see at any watering-place that the relative social
influence of different cities does not depend upon the intellectual
training of their women, so much as on the manners. And, even if this is
very unreasonable, the remedy would seem to be, not to go about lecturing
on the intrinsic superiority of the Muses to the Graces, but to pay due
homage at all the shrines.

It is a great deal to ask of reformers, especially, that they should be
ornamental as well as useful; and I would by no means indorse the views of
a lady who once told me that she was ready to adopt the most radical views
of the women-reformers if she could see one well-dressed woman who
accepted them. The place where we should draw the line between independence
and deference, between essentials and non-essentials, between great ideas
and little courtesies, will probably never be determined--except by actual
examples. Yet it is safe to fall back on Miss Edgeworth's maxim in "Helen,"
that "Every one who makes goodness disagreeable commits high treason
against virtue." And it is not a pleasant result of our good deeds, that