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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
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