he press he took
more pains than Junius did a century later to conceal his identity.
The publisher of _The Ladies' Calling_, for example, assures us that
he knows no more than we do. The MS. came to him from an unknown
source and in a strange handwriting, "as from the Clouds dropt into my
hands." The anonymous author made no attempt to see proofs of it, nor
claimed his foundling in any way whatever. In his _English Prose
Selections_, the recent third volume of which covers the ground we are
dealing with, Mr. Craik, although finding room for such wretched
writers as Bishop Cumberland and William Sherlock, makes no mention of
the author of _The Whole Duty_. That is a curious oversight. There was
no divine of the age who wielded a more graceful pen. Only the
exigencies of our space restrain us from quoting the noble praise of
the Woman-Confessor in the preface to _The Ladies' Calling_. It begins
"Queens and Empresses knew then no title so glorious"; and the reader
who is curious in such matters will refer to it for himself.

The women of this time troubled our author by their loudness of
speech. There seems some reason to believe that with the Restoration,
and in opposition to the affected whispering of the Puritans, a
truculent and noisy manner became the fashion among Englishwomen. This
was, perhaps, the "barbarous dissonance" that Milton deprecated; it
is, at all events, so distasteful to the writer of _The Ladies'
Calling_ that he gives it an early prominence in his exhortation. "A
woman's tongue," he says, "should be like the imaginary music of the
spheres, sweet and charming, but not to be heard at distance."
Modesty, indeed, he inculcates as the first ornament of womanhood, and
he intimates that there was much neglect of it in his day. We might
fancy it to be Mrs. Lynn Linton speaking when, with uplifted hands, he
cries, "Would God that they would take, in exchange for that virile
Boldness, which is now too common among many even of the best Rank,"
such a solidity and firmness of mind as will permit them to succeed
in--keeping a secret! Odd to hear a grave and polite divine urging the
ladies of his congregation not to "adorn" their conversation with
oaths and imprecations, of which he says, with not less truth than
gallantry, that "out of a woman's mouth there is on this side Hell no
noise that can be more amazingly odious." The revolting daughters of
to-day do not curse and swear; at all events, they do not swear i