VALUE OF A FEMALE ADVISER.

A female adviser is a wondrous advantage to a man, in every pursuit or vocation. In woman there is at once a suitable delicacy of tact, and a plain soundness of judgment, which are rarely combined to an equal degree in man. A woman, if she is really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor and repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing, for a woman friend always desires to be proud of you. At the same time her constitutional timidity makes her more cautious than your male friend. She therefore seldom counsels you to do an imprudent thing. By female friendships, I mean pure friendships—those in which there is no ad mixture of the passion of love, except in the married state. A man’s best female friend is a wife of good sense and good heart, whom he loves and who loves him. If he have that, he need not seek else where. But supposing the man to be without such a helpmate, female friendship he must still have, or his intellect will be without a garden, and there will be many an unheeded gap, even in the strongest fence. Better and safer, of course, such friendships, where disparities of years or circumstances put the idea of love out of the question. Middle life has rarely this advantage; youth and old age have. We may have female friendships with those much older and those much younger than ourselves. Moliere’s old house-keeper was a great help to his genius; and Montague’s philosophy takes both a gentler and loftier character of wisdom from the date in which he finds in Marie de Gourney an adopted daughter; “certainly beloved by me,” says the Horace of essayists, “with more than paternal love, and involved in my solicitude and retirement, as one of the best parts of my being.” Female friendship, indeed, is to a man “prsoeidium et dulce decus “— bulwark, sweetener, ornament of his existence. To his mental culture it is invaluable.