oor heart and brains of you; but so
long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are
above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for
manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation
for manhood as brains or beauty.

In short, to be a true woman you have only to be pretty and an idiot,
and to be a true man you have only to be brutal and a fool.

From these misconceptions of manliness and womanliness, these
superstitions of sex, many curious confusions have come about. They so
to say, professional differentiation between the sexes had at one time
gone so far that men were credited with the entire monopoly of a certain
set of human qualities, and women with the monopoly of a certain other
set of human qualities; yet every one of these are qualities which one
would have thought were proper to, and necessary for, all human beings
alike, male and female.

In a dictionary of a date (1856) when everything on earth and in heaven
was settled and written in penny cyclopaedias and books of deportment, I
find these delicious definitions--

_Manly_: becoming a man; firm; brave; undaunted; dignified; noble;
stately; not boyish or womanish.

_Womanly_: becoming a woman; feminine; as _womanly_ behaviour.

Under _Woman_ we find the adjectives--soft, mild, pitiful and flexible,
kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, modest.

Who can doubt that the dictionary maker defined and distributed his
adjectives aright for the year 1856? Since then, however, many alarming
heresies have taken root in our land, and some are heard to declare that
both these sets of adjectives apply to men and women alike, and are, in
fact, necessities of any decent human outfit. Otherwise the conclusion
is obvious, that no one desirous of the adjective 'manly' must ever
be--soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane,
tender, timorous, or modest; and no one desirous of the adjective
'womanly' be--firm, brave, undaunted, dignified, noble, or stately.

But surely the essentials of 'manliness' and 'womanliness' belong to man
and woman alike--the externals are purely artistic considerations, and
subject to the vagaries of fashion. In art no one would think of
allowing fashion any serious artistic opinion. It is usually the art
which is out of fashion that is most truly art. Similarly, fashions in
manliness or womanliness have nothing to do with real manliness or
womanl