ed when she saw her brilliant descendant
appearing in England two years ago as representative of a mighty
colony.

What shall I say about the literary shrew? Let no one be mistaken--we
have a good many of them, and we shall have more and more of them.
There are kind and charming lady-novelists in plenty, and we all owe
them fervent thanks for happy hours; there are deeply-cultured ladies
who make the joy of placid English homes; there are hundreds on
hundreds of honest literary workers who never set down an impure or
ungentle line. I am grateful in reason to all these; but there is
another sort of literary woman towards whom I pretend to feel no
gratitude whatever, and that is the downright literary shrew, who
usually writes, so to speak, in a scream, and whose sentences resemble
bursting packets of pins and needles. She is what the Americans would
call "death on man," and she likes to emphasize her invectives by
always printing "Men" with a capital "M." She is however rigidly
impartial in her distribution of abuse, and she finds out at frequent
intervals that English women and girls are going year by year from bad
to worse. That the earth does not hold a daintier, purer, more
exquisitely lovable being than the well-educated, well-bred English
girl, is an opinion held even by some very cynical males; but the
literary shrew rattles out her libels, and, in order to show how very
virtuous she is, she usually makes her articles unfit to be brought
within the doors of any respectable house. Not that she is ribald--she
is merely so slangy, so audacious, and so bitter that no "prudent" man
would let his daughters glance at a single article turned out by our
emphatic shrew. As to men--well, those ignoble beings fare very badly
at her hands. I do not know exactly what she wants to do with the poor
things, but on paper and on the platform she insists that they shall
practically give up their political power entirely, for women, being
in an immense majority, would naturally outvote the inferior sex.
Sometimes, when the shrew is more than usually capricious and enraged
with her own sex, she may magnanimously propose to disfranchise huge
numbers of women; but, as a rule, she is bent on mastering the
enemy--Man. If you happen to remark that it would be rather awkward if
a majority of women should happen to bring about a war in which
myriads of men would destroy each other, we rather pity you; that
argument always beats the shrew, an