Phenix Gazette

"Fashionable Follies."

We make the following extract from an article under this head, in a late number of Flint's Western Review. The article is copied into Mr. Hale's Magazine for April:

There are in the United States one hundred thousand young ladies, as Sir Ralph Abercrombie said of those of Scotland, "the prettiest lassies in a' the world," who neither know how to toil or spin, who are clothed like the lilies of the valley—who thrum the piano, and a few of the more dainty the harp—who walk as the Bible says, softly, lest brisker movement might snap tapes drawn to their utmost tensions—who have read romances, and some of the interior of the theatres—who have been admired at the examinations of their high schools—who have wrought algebraic resolutions on the black board—who have shown themselves no mean proficients in the casuistry of Paley—who are in short the very roses of the garden, the ottar of life—who, yet can never expect to be married, or if married to live without—shall I speak or forbear?—putting their lily hands to domestic drudgery.

We go into the interior of our recent wooden country. The fair one sits down to clink the wires of the piano. We see the fingers displayed on the keys, which we are sure never prepared a dinner, or made a garment for their robustious brothers. We traverse the streets of our own city, and the wires of the piano are drummed in our ears from every considerable house. In cities and villages from one extremity of the union to the other, wherever there is a house, and the doors and windows betoken the presence of the mild mouths, the ringing of the piano wires is almost as universal a sound, as the domestic hum of life within.

We need not enter in person. Imagination sees the fair, erect on her music stool laced and pinioned and bishop sleeved, and deformed with hair torn from another's scalp, and reduced to a questionable class of etymology, recundo more. dinging, as a Sawney would say, at the wires, as though she could in some way hammer out of them music, amusement and a husband. Look at the taper and cream colored fingers. Is she an utilitarian? Ask the fair one, after she has beaten all the music out of the keys—'pretty fair one, canst talk to thy old and sick father, so as to beguile him out of the headach and rheumatism? Canst write a good and straight forward letter of business?" Thou art a chemist. I remember at the examination. Canst compound, prepare and afterwards boil a good pudding? Canst make one of the hundred subordinate ornaments of thy fair person? In short tell us thy use in existence, except to be contemplated as a pretty picture, unless it have a mind, a heart, and we may emphatically add, the perennial value of utility."

It is a sad and lamentable truth, after all the incessant din we have heard, of the march of the mind, the talks about Lyceums, and the interminable theories, inculcations and eulogies of education, that the present is an age of unbounded desire of display and notoriety, of exhaustless and unquestionable burning ambition; and not an age of calm, contented, ripe and useful knowledge for the sacred privacy of the parlor. Display, notoriety, surface, and splendor, these are the first aims of the mothers, and can we expect that the daughters will drink into a better spirit?

To play, sing, glide down the giddy dance, and get a husband, is the lesson; not to be qualified to render his home quiet, well-ordered and happy.

It is notorious that there will be no intermediate class between those who toil and spin, and those whose claim to be ladies is founded on their being incapable of any value or utility. At present we know of none, except the little army of martyrs, yclept school mistresses, and still smaller corps of editorial and active blue stockings.

If it should be my lot to transmigrate back to earth, in the form of a young man, my first homages in search of a wife would be paid to the thoughtful and pale faced fair one, surrounded by her noisy and refractory subjects, drilling her soul to patience, and learning to drink of the cup of earthly discipline, and, more impressively than by a thousand sermons, tasting the bitterness of our probationary course, in teaching the young idea how to shoot. Except as aforesaid school mistresses and blues, we believe, that all other damsels, clearly within the purview of the term of lady, estimate the clearness of their title precisely in the ratio of their uselessness.