alculation of chances, to turn
up during that lapse of time, among the women whose tastes and
personal position admitted of their devoting themselves to these
pursuits. In all things which there has yet been time for--in all but
the very highest grades in the scale of excellence, especially in the
department in which they have been longest engaged, literature (both
prose and poetry)--women have done quite as much, have obtained fully
as high prizes and as many of them, as could be expected from the
length of time and the number of competitors. If we go back to the
earlier period when very few women made the attempt, yet some of
those few made it with distinguished success. The Greeks always
accounted Sappho among their great poets; and we may well suppose
that Myrtis, said to have been the teacher of Pindar, and Corinna,
who five times bore away from him the prize of poetry, must at least
have had sufficient merit to admit of being compared with that great
name. Aspasia did not leave any philosophical writings; but it is an
admitted fact that Socrates resorted to her for instruction, and
avowed himself to have obtained it.

If we consider the works of women in modern times, and contrast them
with those of men, either in the literary or the artistic department,
such inferiority as may be observed resolves itself essentially into
one thing: but that is a most material one; deficiency of
originality. Not total deficiency; for every production of mind which
is of any substantive value, has an originality of its own--is a
conception of the mind itself, not a copy of something else. Thoughts
original, in the sense of being unborrowed--of being derived from the
thinker's own observations or intellectual processes--are abundant in
the writings of women. But they have not yet produced any of those
great and luminous new ideas which form an era in thought, nor those
fundamentally new conceptions in art, which open a vista of possible
effects not before thought of, and found a new school. Their
compositions are mostly grounded on the existing fund of thought, and
their creations do not deviate widely from existing types. This is
the sort of inferiority which their works manifest: for in point of
execution, in the detailed application of thought, and the perfection
of style, there is no inferiority. Our best novelists in point of
composition, and of the management of detail, have mostly been women;
and there is not in all modern l