Yours, &c.

THE TIMES OF GEORGE II.[18]

Female authorship is beginning to flourish in England. To this
employment no rational objection can be raised. The want of occupation
for female life in the higher classes has long been a subject of
complaint, and any honest change which removes it will be a change for
the better. The quantity of time and thread which has been wasted on
chainstitch, and roundstitch, and all the other mysteries of the needle,
in the last three centuries, is beyond all calculation. If the fair
artists had been workers at the loom, they might have clothed half the
living population in "fine linen," if not in purple. If they had been
equally diligent in brickmaking, they might have built ten Babels; or if
they had devoted similar energies, on Iago's hint, "to suckle fools, and
chronicle small beer," they might have tripled the population, or
anticipated the colossal vats of Messrs Truman & Co. What myriads of
young faces have grown old over worsted parrots and linsey-wolsey maps
of the terrestrial globe! What exquisite fingers have been thinned to
the bone, in creating carnations to be sat upon, and cowslip beds for
the repose of favourite poodles! What bright eyes have been reduced to
spectacles, in the remorseless fabrication of patchwork, quilts and
flowery footstools for the feet of gouty gentlemen! Nay, what thousands
and tens of thousands have been flung into the arms of their only
bridegroom, Consumption, leaving nothing to record their existence but
an accumulation of trifles, which cost them only their health, their
tempers, their time, their charms, and their usefulness!

But the age of knitting and tambour passed away. The spinning-jenny was
its mortal enemy. The most inveterate of fringemakers, the most
painstaking devotee of patchwork, when she found that Arkwright could
make in a minute more than with all her diligence she could make in a
month, and that old Robert Peel could pour out figured muslins, by a
twist of a screw, sufficient to give gowns to the whole petticoat
population of England, had only to give in; the spinsterhood were forced
to feel that their "occupation was o'er."

Even then, however, the female fingers were not suffered to "forget
their cunning;" and the age of purse-making began. The land was
inundated with purses of every shape, size, and substance. Then
followed another change. The Berlin manufacturers had contrived to bring
back th