n foreign
works, that because they have no such thoughts put before them in
English authors, no such thoughts exist in them.

But happily we may do much towards mending this state of things, by
making our pupils thoroughly conversant with the aesthetic treasures
of English literature. From them I firmly believe they may derive
sufficient rules whereby to separate in foreign books the true from
the false, the necessary from the accidental, the eternal truth from
its peculiar national vesture. Above all, we shall give them a
better chance of seeing things from that side from which God intended
English women to see them: for as surely as there is an English view
of everything, so surely God intends us to take that view; and He who
gave us our English character intends us to develop its
peculiarities, as He intends the French woman to develop hers, that
so each nation by learning to understand itself, may learn to
understand, and therefore to profit, by its neighbour. He who has
not cultivated his own plot of ground will hardly know much about the
tillage of his neighbour's land. And she who does not appreciate the
mind of her own countrymen will never form any true judgment of the
mind of foreigners. Let English women be sure that the best way to
understand the heroines of the Continent is not by mimicking them,
however noble they may be, not by trying to become a sham Rahel, or a
sham De Sevigne, but a real Elizabeth Fry, Felicia Hemans, or Hannah
More. What indeed entitles either Madame de Sevigne or Rahel to
fame, but their very nationality--that intensely local style of
language and feeling which clothes their genius with a living body
instead of leaving it in the abstractions of a dreary cosmopolitism?
The one I suppose would be called the very beau-ideal, not of woman,
but of the French woman--the other the ideal, not even of the Jewess,
but of the German Jewess. We may admire wherever we find worth; but
if we try to imitate, we only caricature. Excellence grows in all
climes, transplants to none: the palm luxuriates only in the
tropics, the Alp-rose only beside eternal snows. Only by standing on
our own native earth can we enjoy or even see aright the distant
stars: if we try to reach them, we shall at once lose sight of them,
and drop helpless in a new element, unfitted for our limbs.

Teach, then, the young, by an extended knowledge of English
literature, thoroughly to comprehend the English spirit,