story had not to be told. But these are not reporting columns; very
little of it shall trouble them. The position is faced, and that is all.
The position is one of the battles incident to women, their hardest. It
asks for more than justice from men, for generosity, our civilization
not being yet of the purest. That cry of hounds at her disrobing by Law
is instinctive. She runs, and they give tongue; she is a creature of the
chase. Let her escape unmangled, it will pass in the record that she
did once publicly run, and some old dogs will persist in thinking
her cunninger than the virtuous, which never put themselves in such
positions, but ply the distaff at home. Never should reputation of woman
trail a scent! How true! and true also that the women of waxwork never
do; and that the women of happy marriages do not; nor the women of
holy nunneries; nor the women lucky in their arts. It is a test of the
civilized to see and hear, and add no yapping to the spectacle.

Thousands have reflected on a Diarist's power to cancel our Burial
Service. Not alone the cleric's good work is upset by him; but the
sexton's as well. He howks the grave, and transforms the quiet worms,
busy on a single poor peaceable body, into winged serpents that disorder
sky and earth with a deadly flight of zig-zags, like military rockets,
among the living. And if these are given to cry too much, to have their
tender sentiments considered, it cannot be said that History requires
the flaying of them. A gouty Diarist, a sheer gossip Diarist, may thus,
in the bequest of a trail of reminiscences, explode our temples (for
our very temples have powder in store), our treasuries, our homesteads,
alive with dynamitic stuff; nay, disconcert our inherited veneration,
dislocate the intimate connexion between the tugged flaxen forelock and
a title.

No similar blame is incurred by Henry Wilmers. No blame whatever, one
would say, if he had been less, copious, or not so subservient, in
recording the lady's utterances; for though the wit of a woman may be
terse, quite spontaneous, as this lady's assuredly was here and there,
she is apt to spin it out of a museful mind, at her toilette, or by the
lonely fire, and sometimes it is imitative; admirers should beware of
holding it up to the withering glare of print: she herself, quoting an
obscure maximmonger, says of these lapidary sentences, that they have
merely 'the value of chalk-eggs, which lure the thinker to sit,'
and