our own American readers. Our women are educated
to self-reliance,--and our men are, at least, too busy for the trade of
tempters.

In a word, this book was written for French people, and is adjusted to
the meridian of Paris. We must remember this always in reading it, and
also remember that a Frenchman does not think English any more than he
_talks_ it. We sometimes flatter ourselves with the idea that we as a
people are original in our tendency to extravagance of thought and
language. It is a conceit of ours. Remember Sterne's _perruquier_.

"'You may immerge it,' replied he, 'into the ocean, and it will stand.'

"'What a great scale is everything upon, in this city!' thought I. 'The
utmost stretch of an English periwig-maker's ideas could have gone no
farther than to have dipped it into a pail of water.'"

* * * * *

How much such experiences as the following amount to we must leave to
the ecclesiastical bodies to settle.

"The Church is openly against her, [woman,] owing her a grudge for the
sin of Eve."

"It is very easy for us, educated in the religion of the indulgent God
of Nature, to look our common destiny in the face. But she, impressed
with the dogma of eternal punishment, though she may have received other
ideas from you, still, in her suffering and debility, has painful
foreshadowings of the future state."

But here are physiological statements which we take the liberty to
question on our own responsibility.

"A French girl of fifteen is as mature as an English one of eighteen."
What will Mr. Roberton of Manchester, who has exploded so many of our
fancies about the women of the East, say to this?

"A wound, for which the German woman would require surgical aid, in the
French woman cures itself." We must say of such an unproved assertion as
the French General said of the charge at Balaklava,--"_C'est magnifique,
mais ce n'est pas la_"--_medecine_.

"Generally, she [woman] is sick from love,--man, from indigestion." What
a pity Nature never makes such pretty epigrams with her facts as wits do
with their words!

We have enough, too, of that self-assertion which Carlyle and Ruskin and
some of our clerical neighbors have made us familiar with, and which
gives flavor to a work of genius. "I was worth more than my writings,
more than my discourses. I brought to this teaching of philosophy and
history a soul as yet entire,--a great freshness of mind, under forms
often