“‘You may immerge it,’ replied he, ‘into the ocean, and it will stand.’

“‘What a great scale is everything upon, in this city!’ thought I.  ’The utmost stretch of an English periwig-maker’s ideas could have gone no farther than to have dipped it into a pail of water.’”

* * * * *

How much such experiences as the following amount to we must leave to the ecclesiastical bodies to settle.

“The Church is openly against her, [woman,] owing her a grudge for the sin of Eve.”

“It is very easy for us, educated in the religion of the indulgent God of Nature, to look our common destiny in the face.  But she, impressed with the dogma of eternal punishment, though she may have received other ideas from you, still, in her suffering and debility, has painful foreshadowings of the future state.”

But here are physiological statements which we take the liberty to question on our own responsibility.

“A French girl of fifteen is as mature as an English one of eighteen.”  What will Mr. Roberton of Manchester, who has exploded so many of our fancies about the women of the East, say to this?

“A wound, for which the German woman would require surgical aid, in the French woman cures itself.”  We must say of such an unproved assertion as the French General said of the charge at Balaklava,—­“C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la”—­medecine.

“Generally, she [woman] is sick from love,—­man, from indigestion.”  What a pity Nature never makes such pretty epigrams with her facts as wits do with their words!

We have enough, too, of that self-assertion which Carlyle and Ruskin and some of our clerical neighbors have made us familiar with, and which gives flavor to a work of genius.  “I was worth more than my writings, more than my discourses.  I brought to this teaching of philosophy and history a soul as yet entire,—­a great freshness of mind, under forms often subtle,—­a true simplicity of heart,” etc.

M. Michelet does not undervalue the importance of his work.  He thinks he has ruined the dancing-gardens by the startling revelations respecting woman contained in his book.  He announces a still greater triumph:—­“I believe I have effectually suppressed old women.  They will no longer be met with.”  M. Michelet has not seen the columns of some of our weekly newspapers.

These are scales from the husk of his book, which, with all its fantasies, is a generous plea for woman.  Wise persons may safely read it, though they be not Parisians.

The translation is, and is generally considered, excellent.  We notice two errors,—­Jerres, instead of Serres,—­and would, for should, after the Scotch and Southern provincial fashion;—­with some questionable words, as reliable, for which we have Sir Robert Peel’s authority, which cannot make it as honest a word as trustworthy,—­ masculize, which is at least intelligible,—­and fast, used as college-boys use it in their loose talk, but not with the meaning which sober scholars are wont to give it.  With these slight exceptions, the translation appears to us singularly felicitous, notwithstanding the task must have been very difficult, which Dr. Palmer has performed with such rare success.