counterpart we have ever met; Julia, the most perfect type of his fancy, impetuous, sparkling, and sweet, has this to say for herself, on occasion of a boat-race:—­“‘We have won at last,’ cried Julia, all on fire, ‘and fairly; only think of that!’” Through every sentence that he jots down runs a vein of gentle satire on the sex.  Every specimen that he has drawn from it possesses feline characteristics:  if provoked, they scratch; if happy, they purr; when they move, it is with the bodies of panthers; when they caress their children, it is like snakes; and in every single one of his books the women listen, behind the door, behind the hedge, behind the boat.

    “‘He would make an intolerable woman,’ says the Baroness.  ’A fine
    life, if one had a parcel of women about one, blurting out their
    real minds every moment, and never smoothing matters!’

    “‘Mamma, what a horrid picture!’ cries Laure.”

When upon this subject our author leaves innuendo, and fairly shows his colors, he writes in this wise:—­

“For nothing is so hard to her sex as a long, steady struggle.  In matters physical, this is the thing the muscles of the fair cannot stand.  In matters intellectual and moral, the long strain it is that beats them dead.  Do not look for a Bacona, a Newtona, a Handella, a Victoria Huga.  Some American ladies tell us education has stopped the growth of these.  No, Mesdames!  These are not in Nature.  They can bubble letters in ten minutes that you could no more deliver to order in ten days than a river can play like a fountain.  They can sparkle gems of stories; they can flash little diamonds of poems.  The entire sex has never produced one opera, nor one epic that mankind could tolerate a minute:  and why?—­these come by long, high-strung labor.  But, weak as they are in the long run of everything but the affections, (and there giants,) they are all overpowering while the gallop lasts.  Fragilla shall dance any two of you flat on the floor before four o’clock, and then dance on till peep of day.  You trundle off to your business as usual, and could dance again the next night, and so on through countless ages.  She who danced you into nothing is in bed, a human jelly crowned with headache.”

Certainly, the concluding sentence shows that the writer is unacquainted with the Fifth-Avenue Fragilla.  And, moreover, we were unaware that she had ever entered herself as competitor with Dr. Windship in the lifting of three-thousand-pound weights.  But this is poor stuff for a man of talent to busy himself with,—­as if the Creator intended rivalry between beings complementary to each other, and of too diverse physical organization to allow the idea.  Yet a fair friend of ours would meet him on his own ungallant ground.  If Mr. Reade will trouble himself, says Una and the Lion, to turn over a work of Frances Power Cobbe’s on Intuitive Morals, he will see that the first two