the multitude, and so say I, although I scarce
can hope it; for who shall dare to think that Heaven will grant its
benediction on a compact steeped in earthliness, and formed without one
heavenward view!

* * * * *

THE WRONGS OF WOMEN.

I knew, my dear Eusebius, how delighted you would be with that paper in
Maga on "Woman's Rights." It was balm to your Quixotic spirit. Though your
limbs are a little rheumatic, and you do not so often as you were wont,
when your hair was black as raven's wing, raise your hands to take down
the armour that you have long since hung up, you know and feel with pride
that it has been charmed by due night-watchings, and will yet serve many a
good turn, should occasion require your service for woman in danger. Then,
indeed, would you buckle on in defence of all or any that ever did, or did
not, "buckle to." Then would come a happy cure to aching bones--made whole
with honourable bruises, oblivious of pain, the "_bruchia livida_,"
lithesome and triumphant. Your devotion to the sex has been seasoned under
burning sun and winter frost, and has yet vital heat against icy age, come
on fast as it will. You would not chill, Eusebius, though you were hours
under a pump in a November night, and lusty arms at work watering your
tender passion.

I know you. Rebecca and her daughters had a good word, a soft word from
you, till you found out their beards. No mercy with them after that with
you--the cowardly disguise--pike for pike was the cry. It was laughable to
see you, and to hear you, as you brought a battery that could never reach
them--fired upon them the reproach of Diogenes to an effeminate--"If he
was offended with nature for making him a man, and not a woman;" and the
affirmation of the Pedasians, from your friend Herodotus, that, whenever
any calamity befell them, a prodigious beard grew on the chin of the
priestess of Minerva. You ever thought a man in woman's disguise a
profanation--a woman in man's a horror. The fair sex were never, in your
eyes, the weaker and the worse; how oft have you delighted in their
outward grace and moral purity, contrasting them with gross man,
gloriously turning the argument in their favour by your new
emphasis--"Give every _man_ his deserts, and who shall escape
whipping"--satisfying yourself, and every one else, that good, true,
woman-loving Shakspeare must have meant the passage so to be read. And do
you remember a who