all John Knox's
arguments against the 'Regiment of Women;' and a literature sprang up in
which woman was set forth no longer as the weakling and the temptress,
but as the guide and the inspirer of man. Whatever traces of the old
foul leaven may be found in Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, or Ben
Jonson, such books as Sidney's 'Arcadia,' Lyly's 'Euphues,' Spenser's
'Fairy Queen,' and last, but not least, Shakespeare's Plays, place the
conception of woman and of the rights of woman on a vantage-ground from
which I believe it can never permanently fall again--at least until
(which God forbid) true manhood has died out of England. To a boy whose
notions of his duty to woman had been formed, not on Horace and Juvenal,
but on Spenser and Shakespeare,--as I trust they will be some day in
every public school,--Mr. John Stuart Mill's new book would seem little
more than a text-book of truths which had been familiar and natural to
him ever since he first stood by his mother's knee.

I say this not in depreciation of Mr. Mill's book. I mean it for the
very highest praise. M. Agassiz says somewhere that every great
scientific truth must go through three stages of public opinion. Men
will say of it, first, that it is not true; next, that it is contrary to
religion; and lastly, that every one knew it already. The last assertion
of the three is often more than half true. In many cases every one ought
to have known the truth already, if they had but used their common sense.
The great antiquity of the earth is a case in point. Forty years ago it
was still untrue; five-and-twenty years ago it was still contrary to
religion. Now every child who uses his common sense can see, from
looking at the rocks and stones about him, that the earth is many
thousand, it may be many hundreds of thousands of years old; and there is
no difficulty now in making him convince himself, by his own eyes and his
own reason, of the most prodigious facts of the glacial epoch.

And so it ought to be with the truths which Mr. Mill has set forth. If
the minds of lads can but be kept clear of Pagan brutalities and mediaeval
superstitions, and fed instead on the soundest and noblest of our English
literature, Mr. Mill's creed about women will, I verily believe, seem to
them as one which they have always held by instinct; as a natural
deduction from their own intercourse with their mothers, their aunts,
their sisters: and thus Mr. Mill's book may achieve th