YOUNG LADIES' READER : EMBRACING A COMPREHENSIVE COURSE OF INSTRUCTION IN THE PRINCIPLES OF RHETORICAL READING; WITH CHOICE COLLECTION OF EXERCISES IN READING. BOTH IN PROSE AND POETRY. FOR THE USE OF THE HIGHER FEMALE SEMINARIES, AS ALSO, THE HIGHER CLASSES IN FEMALE SCHOOLS GENERALLY, BY CHARLES W. SANDERS, A.M., AUTHOR OF "A SERIES OF SCHOOL READERS," SPELLER, DEFINER, AND ANALYZER," * NEW YORK: IVISON & PHINNEY, 321 BROADWAY. AUBURN: GOSS & WILLIAMS. BUFFALO: PHINNEY & CO. 1858. Entered, accord ng to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by CHARLES W. SANDERS. I tho Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. PREFACE. "As in life, so in one's studies, the most beautiful and the most humane thing is, I think, so to blend the grave and the gay, that the one may not settle down into melancholy, nor the other degenerate into levity." This observation, which is from the younger Pliny, one of the most agreeable writers of antiquity, and which, in other words by other authors, has often been made, indicates the principle, so far as style is concerned, on which the whole series of Sanders' Reading Books, from first to last, has been designed to be constructed. In none of the series, however, has the application of this principle been more studiously observed, since in none has it appeared more decidedly appropriate, than in the present volume. In the selection of the matter, after the first and highest duty, which was to secure in each piece the best possible moral tendency, that which came next in the order of importance, was to awaken and prolong attention by a judicious combination of all varieties of style, subject, and diction. But, though the primary object of this, as of every similar work, is to furnish a suitable series of exercises in the art of reading, and though, for the better accomplishment of that purpose, compositions, in which gravity and gayety are duly mingled, have been carefully sought, while direct moral instructions are frequently enforced, the book will be found, beside all this, to abound every where in those incidental and collateral teachings, which are all the more striking, because unexpected, and all the more impressive, because connected with particular characters and circumstances. To secure pie accordingly, in which noble sentiments, expressed in eleganaguage, fall, as it were, by the way-side, and acquire extraordine interest from extraordinary circumstances, has been the most difficult task in the preparation of this Young Ladies' Reader. It has cost a deal of time and a deal of thought. For what, in some general sense, might be considered an admira |