h according to the old axiom
make woman what she is. As nothing short of this can by any possibility
enable us to understand the feminine nature, we must not find fault with
some details not commonly thought adapted to the general reader. They
are given delicately, but they are given, and suggest a certain reserve
in introducing the book to the reading classes. Not only is woman an
invalid, but the _rhythmic character of her life_, "as if scanned by
Nature," is an element not to be neglected without total failure to read
her in health and in disease. There is a great deal relating to this
matter, some of it seeming fanciful and overwrought, but not more so
than the natures of many women. For woman herself is an hyperbole, and
the plainest statement of her condition is a figure of speech. Some of
those chapters that are written, as we might say, in hysteric
paragraphs, only more fitly express the extravagances which belong to
the nervous movements of the woman's nature.

_The husband must create the wife_. Much of the book is taken up with
the precepts by which this new birth of the woman is to be brought
about, M. Michelet's "entire affection" hateth those "nicer hands" winch
would refuse any, even the humblest offices. The husband should be at
once nurse and physician. He should regulate the food of the body, and
measure out the doses of mental nourishment. All this is kind and good
and affectionate; but there is just a suspicion excited that _Madame_
might become slightly _ennuyee_, if she were subjected to this minute
surveillance over her physical and spiritual hygiene. Everything must
depend on individual tendencies and aptitudes; we have known husbands
that were born for nurses,--and others, not less affectionate, that
worried more than they helped in that capacity.

We cannot follow M. Michelet through his study of the reaction of the
characters of the husband and wife upon each other, of the influence of
maternity on conjugal relations, of the languishing of love and its
rejuvenescence. Still less can we do more than remotely allude to those
chapters in which his model woman is represented as ready on the
slightest occasion to prove the name of her sex synonymous with frailty.
We really do not know what to make of such things. The cool calculations
of temptation as certain, and failure as probable,--the serious advice
not to strike a wife under any circumstances,--such words have literally
no meaning to most of