le afternoon maintaining, that the well-known song of
"Billy Taylor" was a serious, true, good, epic poem, in eulogy of the
exploits of a glorious woman, and in no way ridiculous to those whose
language it spoke; and when we all gave it against you, how you turned
round upon the poor author, and said he ought to have the bastinado at the
soles of his feet?

And if an occasional disappointment, a small delinquency in some feminine
character did now and then happen, and a little sly satire would force its
way, quietly too, out of the sides of your mouth, how happily would you
instantly disown it, fling it from you as a thing not yours, then catch at
it, and sport with it as if you could afford to sport with it, and thereby
show it was no serious truth, and pass it off with the passage from
Dryden--

"Madam, these words are chanticleer's, not mine;
I honour dames, and think their sex divine!"

No human being ever collected so many of the good sayings and doings of
women as you, Eusebius. I am not, then, surprised that, having read the
"Rights of Women," you are come to the determination to take up "The
Wrongs of Women." The wrongs of women, alas!

----"Adeo sunt multa loquacem
Delassare valent Fabium."

And so you write to me, to supply you with some sketches from nature,
instances of the "Wrongs of Woman." Ah me! Does not this earth teem with
them--the autumnal winds moan with them? The miseries want a good hurricane
to sweep them off the land, and the dwellings the "foul fiend" hath
contaminated. Man's doing, and woman's suffering, and thence even arises
the beauty of loveliness--woman's patience. In the very palpable darkness
besetting the ways of domestic life, woman's virtue walks forth loveliest--

"Virtue gives herself light, through darkness for to wade."

The gentle Spenser, did he not love woman's virtue, and weep for her
wrongs? You, Eusebius, were wont ever to quote his tender lament:--

"Naught is there under heaven's wide hollowness
That moves more clear compassion of mind
Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness
By envy's frowns or fortune's freaks unkind.
I, whether lately through her brightness blind,
Or through allegiance and fast fealty,
Which _I do owe unto all womankind_,
Feel my heart pierced with so great agony,
When such I see, that all for pity I could die."

This melting mood will not long suit your mercurial spirit. You used to
say that the fairies wer