Woman, sister—­there are some things which you do not execute as well as your brother, man; no, nor ever will.  Pardon me if I doubt whether you will ever produce a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great scholar.  By which last is meant—­not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men’s bones, into the unity of breathing life.  If you can create yourselves into any of these great creators, why have you not?  Do not ask me to say otherwise; because if you do, you will lead me into temptation.  For I swore early in life never to utter a falsehood, and, above all, a sycophantic falsehood; and, in the false homage of the modern press towards women, there is horrible sycophancy.  It is as hollow, most of it, and it is as fleeting as is the love that lurks in uxoriousness.  Yet, if a woman asks me to tell a faleshood, I have long made up my mind—­that on moral considerations I will, and ought to do so, whether it be for any purpose of glory to her, or of screening her foibles (for she does commit a few), or of humbly, as a vassal, paying a peppercorn rent to her august privilege of caprice.  Barring these cases, I must adhere to my resolution of telling no fibs.  And I repeat, therefore, but not to be rude, I repeat in Latin—­

  Excudent alii melius spirantia signa,
  Credo equidem vivos ducent de marmore vultus: 
  Altius ascendent:  at tu caput, Eva, memento
  Sandalo ut infringas referenti oracula tanta.[6]

Yet, sister woman—­though I cannot consent to find a Mozart or a Michael Angelo in your sex, until that day when you claim my promise as to falsehood—­cheerfully, and with the love that burns in depths of admiration, I acknowledge that you can do one thing as well as the best of us men—­a greater thing than even Mozart is known to have done, or Michael Angelo—­you can die grandly, and as goddesses would die were goddesses mortal.  If any distant world (which may be the case) are so far ahead of us Tellurians in optical resources as to see distinctly through their telescopes all that we do on earth, what is the grandest sight to which we ever treat them?  St. Peter’s at Rome, do you fancy, on Easter Sunday, or Luxor, or perhaps the Himalayas?  Pooh! pooh! my friend:  suggest something better; these are baubles to them; they see in other worlds, in their own, far better toys of the same kind.  These, take my word for it, are nothing.  Do you give it up?  The finest thing, then, we have to show them is a scaffold on the morning of execution.  I assure you there is a strong muster in those fair telescopic worlds, on any such morning, of those who happen to find themselves occupying the right hemisphere for a peep at us.