ture that actually is, we must turn to
France for the highest examples of womanly achievement in almost every
department. We confess ourselves unacquainted with the productions of
those awful women of Italy, who held professorial chairs, and were great
in civil and canon law; we have made no researches into the catacombs of
female literature, but we think we may safely conclude that they would
yield no rivals to that which is still unburied; and here, we suppose,
the question of pre-eminence can only lie between England and France.
And to this day, Madame de Sevigne remains the single instance of a woman
who is supreme in a class of literature which has engaged the ambition of
men; Madame Dacier still reigns the queen of blue stockings, though women
have long studied Greek without shame; {33} Madame de Stael's name still
rises first to the lips when we are asked to mention a woman of great
intellectual power; Madame Roland is still the unrivalled type of the
sagacious and sternly heroic, yet lovable woman; George Sand is the
unapproached artist who, to Jean Jacques' eloquence and deep sense of
external nature, unites the clear delineation of character and the tragic
depth of passion. These great names, which mark different epochs, soar
like tall pines amidst a forest of less conspicuous, but not less
fascinating, female writers; and beneath these, again, are spread, like a
thicket of hawthorns, eglantines, and honey-suckles, the women who are
known rather by what they stimulated men to write, than by what they
wrote themselves--the women whose tact, wit, and personal radiance
created the atmosphere of the _Salon_, where literature, philosophy, and
science, emancipated from the trammels of pedantry and technicality,
entered on a brighter stage of existence.

What were the causes of this earlier development and more abundant
manifestation of womanly intellect in France? The primary one, perhaps,
lies in the physiological characteristics of the Gallic race--the small
brain and vivacious temperament which permit the fragile system of woman
to sustain the superlative activity requisite for intellectual
creativeness; while, on the other hand, the larger brain and slower
temperament of the English and Germans are, in the womanly organization,
generally dreamy and passive. The type of humanity in the latter may be
grander, but it requires a larger sum of conditions to produce a perfect
specimen. Throughout the animal world,