remark the silent
acquiescence of the women of America and the Continent in the justice of
these censures.

It is only the British mother who ventures to protest. Now, we
Englishmen have always felt a sort of national pride in the British
mother. It has been a part of our patriotic self-satisfaction to pique
ourselves on her icy decorum, on the merciless severity of her virtue.
Colorless, uninteresting, limited as Continental critics pronounced her
to be, we cherished her the more as something specially our own, and
regarded the Channel as a barrier providentially invented for the
isolation of her spotless prudery. It was peculiarly gratifying to
suppose that on the other side of it there were no British homes, no
British maidens, no British mothers. And it must be owned that the
British mother took her cue admirably. She owned, with a sigh of
complacency, that she was not as other women. She shuddered at foreign
morals, and tabooed French novels. She shook all life and individuality
out of her girls as un-English and Continental. She denounced all
aspirations after higher and larger spheres of effort as unfeminine.
Such a type of woman was naturally dull enough, but it fairly came up to
its own standard; and if its respectability was prudery, it still
earned, and had a right to claim, man's respect. The amusing thing is
the persistence in the claim when the type has passed away.

The British spouse has bloomed into the semi-detached wife, with a
husband always conveniently in the distance, and a cicisbeo as
conveniently in the corner. The British mother has died into the faded
matrimonial schemer, contemptuous of younger sons. The innocent simper
of the British maiden has developed into the loud laugh and the horsey
slang of the girl of the season. But maiden and matron are still on one
point faithful to the traditions of their grandmothers, and front all
censorious comers with a shrug of their shoulder-straps and a flutter of
indignant womanhood. And maiden and matron still claim their insular
exemption from the foibles of their sex. The Pope may do what he will
with the women of Italy, and Monseigneur of Orleans may deal stern
justice out to the women of France; Continental immorality is in the
nature of things; but there is something else that is in the nature of
things too, and before the impeccable majesty of British womanhood every
critic must stand abashed.

Unfortunately, we are no sooner awed with the marbl