dency must sooner or later bear fruit in a
generally recognised code of courtship (whether written or unwritten
does not much matter), prescribing the precise number and character of
the "attentions"--in their adaptation to dancing, croquet-playing,
cracker-pulling, and other conventional pretexts for flirtation--which
virtually amount to an offer of marriage. This scheme, we may mention,
is not wholly imaginary. There is somewhere or other a stratum of
English society in which such a code already exists. At least we have
seen a book of etiquette in which, among similar ordinances, it was laid
down that to hand anything--say a flower or a muffin--to a lady with
the left hand was equivalent to a proposal. The general introduction of
a system of this kind, although it might shorten the lives of timid or
forgetful men, would obviously confer an unspeakable boon upon the
majority of the match-maker's present victims. They would not only know
exactly how far to go with safety, but also how at once to recede. To
offer, for instance, two pieces of muffin firmly and decidedly with the
right hand would probably make up for offering one flower with the left,
at least if there were no guardian or chaperon on the spot to take
instant advantage of the first overture. But it would now perhaps be
premature to enter into the details of a system which it may take a
generation or so more of match-making to introduce.

WOMEN'S HEROINES.

A vigorous and pertinacious effort has of late years been made to
persuade mankind that beauty in women is a matter of very little moment.
As long as literature was more or less a man's vocation, an opposite
tendency prevailed; and a successful novelist would as soon have thought
of flying as of driving a team of ugly heroines through three volumes.
The rapid and portentous increase of authoresses changed the current of
affairs. As a rule, authoresses do not care much about lovely women; and
they must naturally despise the miserable masculine weakness which is
led captive by a pretty face, even if it be only upon paper. They can
have no patience with such feebleness, and it may well seem to them to
be a high and important mission to help to put it down.

It became, accordingly, the fashion at one time among the feminine
writers of fiction to make all their fascinating heroines plain girls
with plenty of soul, and to show, by a series of thrilling love
adventures, how completely in the long run t