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, thoroughly to see that the English mind has its peculiar calling on God’s earth, which alone, and no other, it can fulfil.  Teach them thoroughly to appreciate the artistic and intellectual excellences of their own country; but by no means in a spirit of narrow bigotry:  tell them fairly our national faults—­teach them to unravel those faults from our national virtues; and then there will be no danger of the prejudiced English woman becoming by a sudden revulsion an equally prejudiced cosmopolite and eclectic, as soon as she discovers that her own nation does not monopolise all human perfections; and so trying to become German, Italian, French woman, all at once—­a heterogeneous chaos of imitations, very probably with the faults of all three characters, and the graces of none.  God has given us our own prophets, our own heroines.  To recognise those prophets, to imitate those heroines, is the duty which lies nearest to the English woman, and therefore the duty which God intends her to fulfil.