25th April. Tus is an age of enlightenment, and as almost every day brings tidings of some discovery in the scientific world, our capacity for astonishment anew theories is nearly exhausted, and we accept with preternatural calmness announcements that at the beginning of the century would have created quite a furore. But a leading contemporary has lately commented on a fresh revelation from the realms of physiology, which is of such vast importance and interest to a large majority of humanity, that we cannot refrain from giving the rumour Teay's age has been regarded as a sub-publicity in our columns. Hitherto a
ject to be discreetly ignored, and its investigation altogether forbidden in elite society, but in future we need have no scruples about attending to it openly, especially if the fair being whose years are under discussion has passed her third decade, for the fiat has gone forth that at this period a woman begins to be most dangerously alluring, avd we shall thus be paying the lady in question a very pretty compliment by drawing the world's attention to the fact that she is nearing the desired goal of the "eternal feminine." The de Lutante is played out at last, and once more relegated to the unfledged brood of her quondam companions—the bread-and-butter misses; " sweet seventeen" has had her day, and " thrilling thirty" and "fascinating forty" have taken her place; for it has been scientific cally proved that a woman's beauty does not reach its greatest height until it attains the wallow condition that unkind (and apparently ignorant) critics have hitherto regarded as verging towards superannuation. Further sta~ fistics have been compiled to show that if the future. well-being of our race is under consideration, a woman's third decade is about the right age for her to marry; and there is no doubt that if this idea gains ground, we shall soon look upon a bride of seven or eight-and-twenty as a giddy creature who is rushing blindly into all sorts of responsibilities her youth and inexpert lence will prevent her from fulfilling creditably. 'I'his new doctrine of widdle-aged perfection will bring comfort and joy to many a hale and hearty matron who has been anticipating with dread the flight of time, that under the old s@ime would inevitably have caused her charms to be characterised faded. History repeats itself—fortunately for some of us—and we have evidently rounded the cycle, and reached a period when the advanced years of our female friends are to be regarded possessing as much attraction for modern adorers, as those historic decades of Helen of roy secured from the jeunesse doree of Hellas. And after all, as far as manly comfort is concerned, the novel idea may perhaps have more merit than appears on the surface. Women have been called "kittle cattle," but there can be no question that man is an unruly animal, too, and we believe there is a feminine sentiment not altogether without truth, that he is most likely to prove manageable when his fur is stroked the right way. The lange demand for widows in the matrimonial market leads us to imagine that the woman of thirty may have proved herself more capable of humonring the masculine instinct than the girl of seventeen; to use a sporting metaphor, the latter goes blindly at her fences and often comes a rather severe cropper over ler married happiness, whilst the former reviews the situation carefully, and as a rule, clears the obstacles skilfully and securely. In former days, when the life of the high-walled garden, of which Mrs. Lynn Linton discourses so eloquently, was in vogue, and woman was looked upon as a pretty toy existing entirely for man's material pleasure and satisfaction, incantile charms were fitting passports to the gate of matrimony, which was the end and aim of every orthodox maiden's existence. But a change has come over the spirit of the dream; and just as the race of hard-drinking and plain-speaking squires has given place to a more refined and decidedly more temperate generation of mankind, the matrimonial views of these said gentlemen have also undergone a complete transformation, and the qualifications now necessary to ensure a woman being characterised as a good comrade are very different from those that hitherto did her such good service. That this is an established fact is proved by the altered appearance of the heroine in modern fiction, who is generally represented, if unmarried, as having cousiderably passed what our grandfathers would have called her first youth, and who is invariably considered still more strikingly attractive if she has added the bloom of matrimony to her ripened charms, besides having arrived at the age at which the "Serpent of Old Nile" met with her tragic fate. Verily women's rights will soon be a forgotten cry, if matters advance at their present rate for surely, one of the greatest bugbears of feminine existence has been removed by the promulgation of this new dogma, and there will shortly be no wrongs to redress. It is certainly a wonderful proof of the march of civilisation, and one that is calculated to fill the hearts of Oriental women with unbounded astonishment at the curious unlikeness of Western and Eastern customs. Rudyard Kipling, in one of his famous stories makes a sixteen-year-old Indian girl comment on the "bold white mem-log who make their marriages not before they are old women!" and when told by her English lover that the daughters of his race wed even when they are twenty-five years old, she adds with passionate emphasis: "Who would of his own will take a wife even of eighteen? She is a woman—ageing every hour. Those mem-log remain young forever. How I hate them!" 'A hatred that would certainly have been intensified if the speaker had been suddenly initiated into some of the newest tenets of the detested mem-log's latest gospel.
We would console the depressed @i-durantes upon whom this. startling theory must have burst with rather a severe shock, by reminding them that the idea has not as yet taken root all over the globe, and there is still a chance of their finding for their youthful charms a market from which the belle of a dozen seasons would be ignor miniously ejected. Advanced America is yet behind us in some things; and a proof of the New World's occasional lapse into Cimmerian darkness has been shown by the fact that the Dakota bachelors have recently advertised for a "car-load of young wives!" The qualfying adjective will doubtless cause some slight ray of comfort to gladden the hearts of the despondent damsels whose lack of years entitles them to a place among the "odious race of the unappreciated," and they may even reach the height of magnanimity that would enable them to forgive Walt Whitman for uttering what would be considered rank heresy by his gay and festive compatriots on the shores of the Missouri river "Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young, The young are beautiful—but the old are more beautiful than the young."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.