appiness
that human life and family compact ought to yield, in "acting as a
breakwater" to protect him, and "never disturb his peace," was a great
artist's view of the education needed by a woman! To this I would oppose
my more humble experience, but I am sure there are women enough who
would add theirs thereto, to make the sum equal in weight to that of Mr.
Hamerton's artist friend. Among the women whom I have known in life, the
most highly intellectual have been the least meddlesome; for the very
good reason that they have been too busy with the work of their own
brains to meddle with what concerned other people. Nor have such women
been less the helps, fitted, if need be, to act as "breakwaters" to
protect the calm of a man engaged in any great work. On the contrary,
the discipline acquired in study and thought has been turned to account
in this way, as well as in any other.

Mr. Hamerton gives another friend's view of the education needful for a
woman,--"one of the most intellectual men he ever knew," but "whose wife
really knew nothing of his intellectual existence whatever." His theory
was "that women ought not to be admitted to the region of masculine
thought; it is not good for them."

So Dr. Clarke evidently thinks, and thinks he proves it physiologically.
The existence of the terrible evils he depicts is not to be doubted; and
she would be less than a true woman who did not protest, by precept,
preaching, and example, against the follies and sins of school or social
life that induce such evils: but that it was eating of the fruit of the
tree of knowledge--"persistent brain-work" even--that furnished Dr.
Clarke's cases, "chiefly clinical," an experience of teaching extending
over forty years would forbid me to believe.

As a woman, I have heard the smothered cry of woe as pitiful, of
suffering as great, from those who prayed for death as a relief--though
it was not from suffering of the body--as any that Dr. Clarke describes.

In our pity for physical suffering, some may well be reserved for the
soul of her who

"Sighs amid her narrow days,
Moving about the household ways
In that dark house where she was born."

Indeed, the supposition of Dr. Clarke that psychical influences may have
caused diseases which he describes, casts light upon some sad cases of
invalidism which I have known, and where disease may quite as probably
have been induced by soul-loneliness--intellectual starvation--as by t