is attacks. "No
surrender" is the order of the day. It is only when the criticism of the
outer world withdraws that woman's internal criticism recommences. This
is, indeed, half the offence of outer assailants, that they suspend and
injure the working of that inner discipline which woman exerts over
woman. Mrs. Proudie, it has been said, is the Church.

Women certainly present the only analogy in the present day to that
claim of internal jurisdiction for which the Church struggled so
gallantly in the middle ages. No one who sees the serried ranks with
which she encounters all investigation from without would imagine the
severity with which she administers justice within. Like the Westphalian
Vehm-gericht, the mystery of feminine courts is only equalled by their
terrible sentences. Mrs. Grundy on the seat of justice is a Rhadamanthus
to whom criticism may fairly leave an erring sister. But all this in
nowise weakens the firmness of woman's attitude before an outer foe. She
claims absolute right to all hanging, drawing, and quartering on her
domains. Like a feudal baron, she will yield to no man her stocks and
her gallows. But to judge from the prim front of her squares, the
cordial grasp of hand-in-hand with which they form to resist all
masculine charges, no one would imagine the ruthless severity with which
woman was breaking some poor drummer-boy inside.

We are bound, however, to add, that in all our remarks we have only been
nibbling at the outer rind of a great difficulty. Woman has
characteristically fallen back on a grand principle, and has asserted
her absolute immunity from all criticism whatever. It is not merely that
this critic is deaf or that critic malignant, that one censor is
ignorant and another basely envious of woman. All this special pleading
is totally flung aside, and the defence stands on a basis of the most
uncompromising sort. No man, it is asserted, can judge woman, because no
man can understand her. She is the Sphinx of modern investigation, and
man is not fated to be her OEdipus. We can conceive of few
announcements more welcome, if it be only true.

In an age when everything seems pretty well discovered, when one cannot
preserve even a shred of mystery to cloak the bareness of one's life,
when the very surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious
griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an
amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay more, that an ins