for Handella, there is reason
to believe in her advent,--many women have written faultless tunes,--all
that is wanted is mathematical harmony,--and Mary Somerville, Maria
Mitchell, and the sister of the Herschels forbid despair on that point;
and God forbid the Victoria Huga! the male of the species is more than
enough. We must look upon any wide departure from the prevailing pattern
either as a monstrosity or as a development of the great plan;
therefore, if one of these women is a monstrosity, Laplace and Aristotle
are to be considered equally so. And then, also, Mr. Reade, masculine as
he is, finds eclipse in the shade of either Mrs. Lewes, (Marion Evans,)
or Charlotte Bronte, or Madame Dudevant. As for men, they are themselves
just emerging from barbarism; a race rises only with its women, as all
history shows. The whole sex has produced no operas? they are modern
things; when men have advanced a little, when our audience is ready, we
shall write operas. Epics? how many has the entire opposite sex
produced? well, four: terrible disparity, when we count by billions!
These are not in Nature? Whose assertion for that? till he can prove it,
the word of "some American ladies" is as good as the word of Mr. Charles
Reade. For myself, continued the outraged Una, I know a beautiful woman
who left lovers, society, pleasures,--absorbed in her moulding and
modelling, day by day and year by year, with no positive result except
in her own convictions and consciousness,--who spent the long summer
hours alone in the little building with her white ideas, and who, winter
night after night, rose to cross street and garden and snowy fields to
tend the fire and wet the clay, and who, on more than one morning
finding the weary labor of months wasted where the frozen substance had
peeled from the framework and lay in fragments on the floor, without a
murmur began the patient work again. That was during the trial;
afterwards attainment. Was there no long strain and steady struggle
there?

Una's enthusiasm infects us; and very _apropos_ to all this do we hear
Mr. Reade's Jacintha remark,--

"We are good creatures, but we don't trouble our heads with
justice; it is a word you shall never hear a woman use, unless she
happens to be doing some monstrous injustice at the very moment."

And with the best-natured contempt in the world, Dr. Sampson exclaims,--

"What! go t' a wumman for the truth, when I can go t' infallible