and in fact there is no such thing as travelling any considerable distance or for any length of time in this country without them; and yet, though they do every thing, they are maintained at a trifling expense; for, as they always act the cook, the very licking of their fingers in scarce times, is sufficient for their subsistence." Under the auspices of Matonabbee, and with seven of his wives to accompany him, Hearne set out on his third expedition; and in his plain unvarnished. description of the incredible hardships he underwent, and of the excessive toil imposed upon the females of the expedition, we have a vivid representation of the servile and wretched condition of the female sex in the very highest rank of their nation; for such was Matonabbee, as expressly stated by Hearne, and as incidentally apparent throughout his narrative of the journey. And if, in some savage societies, the condition of woman was better, in others it was worse than represented in the pages of Hearne's Journey.

While the people of Hindostan, it is true, have made such advances in certain of the forms and fixed improvements of civilization, that they cannot be deemed a barbarous people, still the practice of infanticide, and the disregard of chastity, are facts upon the face of things, attesting a barbaric degradation in the social position of woman. Yet there it is, that the widow proves how irreparable is her grief, by devoting herself on the funeral pile as a burnt-offering to hallow the memory of her deceased lord. But how did he earn such unequalled ardor of love? We may read in the Abbé Dubois an extract from one of the sacred books of the Hindus, which expressly enjoins upon her not merely that she is to obey her husband as a master, but that she is to revere him as a god. "When in the presence of her husband," are the words, "a woman must keep her eyes upon her master, and be ready to receive his commands. When he speaks, she must be quiet, and listen to nothing besides. When he calls, she must leave every thing else, and attend upon him alone. A woman has no other god on earth than her husband. The most excellent ofall good works she can perform, is to gratify him with the strictest obedience. This should be her only devotion. Though he be aged, infirm, dissipated, drunkard, or a debauchee, she must still regard him as her god." Such is the text. And these precepts, it is notorious, are practically observed in the domestic intercourse of the Hindus.

Nor is the state of things any better in China, as is well

stated in, if we remember rightly, Morrison's authentic translation of the She-King. "In childhood slighted, in maidenhood sold, in mature womanhood, shackled by the laws which prescribe numerous and unpleasing duties, or rather tasks to their husband's relations, in widowhood controlled by their own sons, in all ages and states considered as immeasurably inferior to men, denied even moral agency in the power of doing either good or evil;-woman is considered by the laws of the country as the bond and appointed slave of man and nature, made such by the same law that gives to the sun its light and to the leopard its spots; and they find their fate but slightly modified by the opinions and practices of their husbands and fathers." No addition of ours to this comprehensive description of the social condition of Woman in cultivated and lettered China could augment its graphic force.

The Christian religion issued out of Judea; and our opinions, especially in Protestant countries, where the Bible is so universally read, expounded, and reverenced, are greatly influenced by the Old Testament, that is, the inspired history, laws, poetry, prophecies, and moral disquisitions of the Jews, which are incorporated into our literature and bias all our trains of thought. Society, as represented in the Bible, had already emerged from the barbarism of the hunter state, and presents itself in the three successive stages of the pastoral, the agricultural, and the commercial and manufacturing states, each being superior in civilization to its predecessor. Substantially the same system of legislation, however, regulated the whole period of time, from the age of the patriarchs, or at least from the exodus out of Egypt, down to the advent of our Savior. And it was not such as favored the condition of the female sex; for polygamy obtained, as in other oriental countries; and women were entirely dependent upon the men, who might repudiate them at will, and without cause. Such laws could not be otherwise than decisive of their general condition; and a careful study of particular facts will bring the mind to the same conclusion, which a consideration of those laws would lead us to draw. The persevering attachment of Jacob for Rachel shows that, in the patriarchal age, woman had acquired a value unknown to the hunter-life; but all the circumstances of their domestic history, so distinctly told by the sacred penman, show, at the same time, that their love was destitute of the delicacy and individuality, essential to the true respectability of woman. Again, it is observable that Sarah, Rebekah,

Zipporah, Ruth, Tamar, the wives and daughters of rich men and princes, appear before us continually in the performance of menial services, or humbly uniting in the pleasures of their lords, not, as with us, the cherished objects of respectful affection, and equal observance. And the remarkable incidents, which well nigh occasioned the annihilation of the tribe of Benjamin, as related in the book of Judges, when the man of Gibeah, instead of contending to the death, as we should have done in defence of the females of his family, offered them as a sacrifice to purchase the safety of his guest, are characteristic of the cotemporary estimation of Woman. To be sure, her condition improved along with the introduction of arts and manufactures into the country; and what it was in the Augustan age of Judea, we see plainly in Solomon's description of a good wife: "She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple. She maketh fine linen and selleth it, and delivereth girdles unto the merchant. She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness." Such, therefore, was the model of a perfect woman at the highest point of civilization among the Jews, a laborious artizan, a discreet housewife, and withal, one amiable and judicious in her deportment and conversation. At the same time, even at this period, there is no social equality, no intellectual refinement, in the comparative condition of the female sex; it is that of an Asiatic laboring under the disabilities of polygamy, just as in the Syria of our own day.

Pass to the Greeks, to a European population, though in and upon the confines of Asia. We know little of the heroic age of Greece; but that little exhibits a manifest social superiority of Woman over what she was in Judea, because polygamy, with all its train of attendant ills, disappears. It is said in the Iliad, of bad men, that they deserve not to enjoy the rights of a citizen, nor the happiness of domestic life; and as to be out of the pale of citizenship was to be an outlaw, we may judge, by the coupling of it with domesticity in the poet's mind, how much Woman had begun to be prized. And we think the fact, that in primitive Greece so many women were deified, and the female deities, as Rhea, Juno, Proserpina, Venus, Minerva, held in at least equal veneration with the male ones, testifies that some imperfect glimpses of the true destiny

To this hour,

of Woman was dawning out upon the age. Andromache and Penelope are beautiful examples of conjugal truth and virtue. On the other hand, so many women, who attained a bad eminence by their vices, Medea, Phædra, Helen, Clytemnestea, do yet attest the growing personal consequence of the sex, in this the cradle of the intellect and civilization of Europe.

Two republics, contrasted in all their institutions, stood at the head of the Greeks. In Sparta, every thing was forced, artificial, unnatural; in Athens, the finely organized Hellenic mind, enamored of taste, beauty, and refinement, had free scope in the following of its native bent. Lycurgus impressed on the women of Sparta a character of hardness and exclusive devotion to the military success of the republic, at the expense of every feminine quality. To wrestle in the Palæstra promiscuously with men, and half naked; not to know or conceive that which is the most indispensable, and yet the first and lowest of the virtues of a wife; to rejoice over the death of a son in the wars; to practice the crime of infanticide as a matter of course, if a child seemed to be of feeble structure: such was the education, such the character, such the habits, of the women of Lacedæmon. Not so in civilized Attica. There a singular state of things ensued, from the keen sense which the cultivated Athenians felt of the value of intellectual female society, acting upon their peculiar domestic institutions. Usage, more despotic and more tyrannical than law, exacted of matrons and other ingenuous women, a life of extreme seclusion. To live in society, to cultivate the exquisite social arts which give intellectual interest to the female sex, was to overstep those conventional boundaries of virtue, which admitted of no return. Hence, although in Attica and other parts of Greece of congenial manners, highly accomplished women existed, and held a pre-eminently brilliant position in society, celebrated by poetic and mimetic art, courted by philosophers, and enriched by princes. Sappho, the poetess, Leæna, famed for her constancy to the slayers of the Pisistratidæ, Aspasia, at once a Ninon de l'Enclos to Socrates, and a Maintenon to Pericles, Lais, the glory and the shame of Corinth, Phryne, who offered to rebuild Thebes at her own charge, and who could boast of a golden image erected to her honor in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, yet all these were public wantons, who usurped among the spiritual and beauty-loving Greeks, that

estimation, which is the rightful due of purity and virtue alone, and which degraded irreparably, while it seemed the most to honor, the nicely constituted character of Woman.

Proceed now to Italy, and raise the veil from the domestic sanctuary of the Romans. There is nothing more striking, all through the history of the kings and of the early republic, than the new aspect under which Woman presents herself, so different from any thing in Greece. The Roman matron possessed the patriotism of the Spartan without her cruelty and coarseness, and the purity of the Athenian without her extreme seclusion; she fell short of the modern European, in that intellectual refinement and high accomplishment, which combined with virtue, belong exclusively to Christendom. Her occupations for a long period, were such as to imply inferiority of condition. Thus, when the Sabines made peace with the Romans at the conclusion of the war occasioned by the forcible abduction of the Sabine maidens, it was stipulated that no labor should be exacted of the latter except spinning. * Hence an old writer, who enumerates the qualities of a good wife, to probity, beauty, fidelity, and chastity, adds, skill in spinning. Nay, the Emperor Augustus seldom wore any apparel but of the manufacture of his wife, daughter, and the ladies of his household.†

What originally gave consequence to the female sex in Rome was the necessity of seeking them, under which the infant people of Romulus labored. Thereafter, we perceive, in the important part played by individual women, what was the general consequence of the sex. Hersilia, with her fellowmatrons, reconciled the Sabines to the city of her forced adop tion; the crime of Tarquin gave birth to the republic; the death of Virginia destroyed the tyranny of the Decemvirs; Veturia rescued Rome from the wrath of Coriolanus; when Brennus held the city at ransom, the Roman ladies stripped themselves of their gold and jewels for the service of the republic, as they did in the equally desperate crisis of the battle of Cannæ. And where such a spirit earned to women such an estimation, it is not strange that it became lawful to praise them in the tribune, to pronounce eulogies to their memory, and to draw them in chariots to the public games, nor that we see in Rome, at this time, instead of the corruption of the Paphian Venus, temples to Female Fortune, and the sacred fire