It is only a woman that can make a man become the parody of himself.-French Proverb.

PROY

ROVERBIAL philosophy has long agreed that woman is a complex creature, little understood, and, according to Michelet, "she is a miracle of Divine contradictions; an opinion endorsed by Pope, who in his "Moral Essays," I writes, "Woman's at best a contradiction still;" and, further, by Richter,2 who says, "A woman is the most inconsistent compound of obstinacy and self-sacrifice that I am acquainted with." The wisest sages from the earliest period have been forced to admit that he would be a truly clever man who could understand, and account for, the many and varied characteristics of womankind, for, as Lord Byron wrote:

"What a strange thing is man! And what a stranger Is woman! What a whirlwind is her head!

And what a whirlpool, full of depth and danger,

Is all the rest about her!

Whether wed

Or widow, maid or mother, she can change her
Mind like the wind; whatever she has said
Or done, is light to what she shall say or do—
The oldest thing on record, and yet new." I

that

And yet it is universally acknowledged woman is indispensable to man's happiness and wellbeing, for, as it is said in Germany, " Man without woman is head without body, woman without man is body without head," which corresponds with the French adage, "Without woman the two extremes of life would be without help, and the middle of it without pleasure ;" and, long ago, the Egyptians were wont to represent man without a woman by a single millstone, which cannot grind alone. The Burmese, too, of to-day maintain that "of all beings woman is most excellent; she is the chief of supporters ;"2 and, according to another of their proverbial maxims, "her intelligence is four times that of man, her assiduity six times, and her desires eight times." Eastern proverbs are highly complimentary to women; for whereas, says a Sanskrit adage, "they are instructed by nature, the learning of men is taught by books; or, as another piece of Oriental wisdom reminds "Nature is woman's teacher, and she learns more sense than man, the pedant, gleams from books." 3 And, in short, the power and influence

us,

I

"Don Juan," canto ix. st. 64.

2 See the "Niti Literature of Burma," by James Gray, 1886, p. 71.

3 See the Rev. T. Long's "Eastern Proverbs and Emblems," 1881, p. 7.