ks the women listen, behind the door, behind
the hedge, behind the boat.

"'He would make an intolerable woman,' says the Baroness. 'A fine
life, if one had a parcel of women about one, blurting out their
real minds every moment, and never smoothing matters!'

"'Mamma, what a horrid picture!' cries Laure."

When upon this subject our author leaves innuendo, and fairly shows his
colors, he writes in this wise:--

"For nothing is so hard to her sex as a long, steady struggle. In
matters physical, this is the thing the muscles of the fair cannot
stand. In matters intellectual and moral, the long strain it is
that beats them dead. Do not look for a Bacona, a Newtona, a
Handella, a Victoria Huga. Some American ladies tell us education
has stopped the growth of these. No, Mesdames! These are not in
Nature. They can bubble letters in ten minutes that you could no
more deliver to order in ten days than a river can play like a
fountain. They can sparkle gems of stories; they can flash little
diamonds of poems. The entire sex has never produced one opera,
nor one epic that mankind could tolerate a minute: and why?--these
come by long, high-strung labor. But, weak as they are in the long
run of everything but the affections, (and there giants,) they are
all overpowering while the gallop lasts. Fragilla shall dance any
two of you flat on the floor before four o'clock, and then dance
on till peep of day. You trundle off to your business as usual,
and could dance again the next night, and so on through countless
ages. She who danced you into nothing is in bed, a human jelly
crowned with headache."

Certainly, the concluding sentence shows that the writer is unacquainted
with the Fifth-Avenue Fragilla. And, moreover, we were unaware that she
had ever entered herself as competitor with Dr. Windship in the lifting
of three-thousand-pound weights. But this is poor stuff for a man of
talent to busy himself with,--as if the Creator intended rivalry between
beings complementary to each other, and of too diverse physical
organization to allow the idea. Yet a fair friend of ours would meet him
on his own ungallant ground. If Mr. Reade will trouble himself, says Una
and the Lion, to turn over a work of Frances Power Cobbe's on Intuitive
Morals, he will see that the first two impossibilities in his catalogue
are lessened so far as to allow hope; as