Of course, a good deal of opposition takes place, but ultimately Margery has her own way and, in spite of a wicked plot set on foot by a jealous competitor, who persuades the Mother Superior that the picture is not Margery’s own work, she succeeds in winning the prize.  The whole account of the gradual development of the conception in the girl’s mind, and the various attempts she makes to give her dream its perfect form, is extremely interesting and, indeed, the book deserves a place among what Sir George Trevelyan has happily termed ‘the art-literature’ of our day.  Mr. Ruskin in prose, and Mr. Browning in poetry, were the first who drew for us the workings of the artist soul, the first who led us from the painting or statue to the hand that fashioned it, and the brain that gave it life.  They seem to have made art more expressive for us, to have shown us a passionate humanity lying behind line and colour.  Theirs was the seed of this new literature, and theirs, too, is its flower; but it is pleasant to note their influence on Miss Corkran’s little story, in which the creation of a picture forms the dominant motif.

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Mrs. Pfeiffer’s Women and Work is a collection of most interesting essays on the relation to health and physical development of the higher education of girls, and the intellectual or more systematised effort of woman.  Mrs. Pfeiffer, who writes a most admirable prose style, deals in succession with the sentimental difficulty, with the economic problem, and with the arguments of physiologists.  She boldly grapples with Professor Romanes, whose recent article in the Nineteenth Century, on the leading characters which mentally differentiate men and women, attracted so much attention, and produces some very valuable statistics from America, where the influence of education on health has been most carefully studied.  Her book is a most important contribution to the discussion of one of the great social problems of our day.  The extended activity of women is now an accomplished fact; its results are on their trial; and Mrs. Pfeiffer’s excellent essays sum up the situation very completely, and show the rational and scientific basis of the movement more clearly and more logically than any other treatise I have as yet seen.

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It is interesting to note that many of the most advanced modern ideas on the subject of the education of women are anticipated by Defoe in his wonderful Essay upon Projects, where he proposes that a college for women should be erected in every county in England, and ten colleges of the kind in London.  ’I have often thought of it, ‘he says,’ as one of the most barbarous customs in the world that we deny the advantages of learning to women.  Their youth is spent to teach them to stitch and sew, or make baubles.  They are taught to read, indeed, and perhaps to write their names or so, and that is the height of a woman’s education.  And I would but ask any who slight the sex for their understanding,