86 KIDD’S OWN JOURNAL. 

WIVES,—USEFUL AND USELESS. 

Whocso findeth a good wife, findeth a good thing. 
SoLomon. 

WE HAVE NOT FAILED TO ACKNOWLEDGE 
on several occasions, the obligations we have 
been under to a certain writer in ‘“‘ Bentley’s 
Miscellany” for a smart hint or two on the 
present alarming state of society. 
Again do we register our friend’s happy 
thoughts,—and this time, his arrow is levelled 
at Modern Education. He has cleft the bull’s- 
eye right in twain. Listen !— 
Look here! behold these twenty-seven adver- 
tisements from people wanting pupils; the 
greatest drug in the advertising market is edu- 
cation. We are too clever by half now-a-days ; 
everybody, in their own opinion, can teach any- 
body. Here’s a lot of knowledge for twenty 
guineas a year, extras included! French, German, 
washing, board, lodging, music, drawing, Calis- 
thenics—what’s that ?—geometry, arithmetic, and 
the use of the globes? Why, its dog cheap—too 
much by half for the money. Old Peacham in 
“The Beggar’s Opera,” who wondered how any 
man alive should ever rear a daughter, must, with 
respect, have been a fool; when daughters can be 
instructed in everything for nothing, we wonder 
who wouldn't rear scores of daughters if he could 
get them off his hands. 
But there’s the difficulty; for, when a man 
comes to choose a wife in this worky-day world, 
his object, in nine cases out of ten, is to get a 
woman who will strive to make a shilling do 
duty for eighteenpence, who will attend to her 
household, watch over her family, and not be above 
doing her duty; and we think we can see in 
these multifarious accomplishments of the present 
day, and the necessary neglect of that solid prac- 
tical education which gives woman a position of 
utility, the reasons why daughters, now-a-days, are 
stock slow of sale, and apt to hang heavily on 
hand. 
Who on earth, unless he be a fool, or a man of 
fortune, can abide to sit down to an ill-dressed 
dinner in a slatternly house, with the bitter relish 
for his victuals from the knowledge that his “lady,” 
at a five-and-twenty pound boarding-school, has 
acquired an appreciable quantity of French, Italian, 
German, Calisthenics (which I suppose is some 
other outlandish lingo), geometry, or globes? 
Pickling, preserving, cooking, making and repair- 
ing her children’s dresses and her own, and a 
knowledge of the use and economy of money, are 
things a marrying man can understand and appre- 
ciate, particularly if he is under the necessity, as 
most of us are, of earning his own bread ; and this, 
I think, is the reason that sundry friends of ours, 
despising boarding-school accomplishments, airs, 
and graces, have gone down to the country, and 
brought up wives who had learned by experience 
of their respectable mothers, the art of presiding 
over a “comfortable home,” and who—to their 
credit be it spoken—don’t know the difference 
between the Italian and Irish, or could not distin- 
guish Calisthenics from Carlotta Grisi. 

Our friend is a bold man, to speak heretical 
language such as this. Fashion strictly 
prohibits any young lady to shine in the 
useful or domestic arts. People of the 
present day see no charms ina quiet, “happy 
home ;” and as to the term “domestic wife’ — 
woe be to him who has the temerity to utter 
it in “genteel” society! His sentence would 
be banishment, from that day forward. 
It seems sad to us, that the word ‘‘ domestic” 
should be’so universally despised. Nor can 
we see any just cause for a man or woman 
being so thoroughly hated for their being 
‘“‘ home-birds.” 
There are some points on which we set 
Fashion at defiance. Those we have hinted 
at are among the number. With our dying 
breath, we shall sing of 
Home !—sweet Home! 
and seek no “ fashionable’’ hand to close our 
eyes. 
THE CHARMS OF POETRY. 
_———— 
The world is rutt of Poetry. The air 
Is living with its spirit. The waves, too, 
Dance to the music of its melodies, 
And sparkle in its brightness. 
PERCIVAL. 
——_ 
IT IS WITH THE POET’S CREATIONS AS 
WITH NATURE’S,—great or small, wherever 
truth and beauty can be shaped into verse, 
and answer to some demand for it in our 
hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether 
in productions grand and beautiful—as some 
great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, 
or no bigger and more pretending than a sweet 
face or a bunch of violets—whether in Ho- 
mer’s Epic or Gray’s Elegy, in the enchanted 
gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the very 
pot-herbs of the ‘‘ Schoolmistress’’ of Shen- 
stone. Not to know and feel this, is to be 
deficient in the universality of Nature herself, 
who calls upon us to admire all her pro- 
ductions. 
What the poet has to cultivate above all 
things is—love and truth. What he has 
to avoid like poison is—the fleeting and the 
false. His earnestness must be innate and 
habitual; born with him, and felt to be his 
most precious inheritance. 
Treatises on Poetry may chance to have 
auditors who think themselves called upon 
to vindicate the superiority of what is termed 
useful knowledge ; but if the poet be allowed 
to pique himself on any one thing more than 
another, compared with those who undervalue 
him, it is on that power of undervaluing 
nobody and no attainments different from 
his own, which is given him by the very 
faculty they despise. The greatest includes 
the less. ‘They do not see that their inability 
to comprehend him argues the smaller 
capacity. 
No man recognises the worth of utility 
more than the poet; he only desires that the 
r or ee 

