I knew, my dear Eusebius, how delighted you would be with that paper in Maga on “Woman’s Rights.”  It was balm to your Quixotic spirit.  Though your limbs are a little rheumatic, and you do not so often as you were wont, when your hair was black as raven’s wing, raise your hands to take down the armour that you have long since hung up, you know and feel with pride that it has been charmed by due night-watchings, and will yet serve many a good turn, should occasion require your service for woman in danger.  Then, indeed, would you buckle on in defence of all or any that ever did, or did not, “buckle to.”  Then would come a happy cure to aching bones—­made whole with honourable bruises, oblivious of pain, the “bruchia livida,” lithesome and triumphant.  Your devotion to the sex has been seasoned under burning sun and winter frost, and has yet vital heat against icy age, come on fast as it will.  You would not chill, Eusebius, though you were hours under a pump in a November night, and lusty arms at work watering your tender passion.

I know you.  Rebecca and her daughters had a good word, a soft word from you, till you found out their beards.  No mercy with them after that with you—­the cowardly disguise—­pike for pike was the cry.  It was laughable to see you, and to hear you, as you brought a battery that could never reach them—­fired upon them the reproach of Diogenes to an effeminate—­“If he was offended with nature for making him a man, and not a woman;” and the affirmation of the Pedasians, from your friend Herodotus, that, whenever any calamity befell them, a prodigious beard grew on the chin of the priestess of Minerva.  You ever thought a man in woman’s disguise a profanation—­a woman in man’s a horror.  The fair sex were never, in your eyes, the weaker and the worse; how oft have you delighted in their outward grace and moral purity, contrasting them with gross man, gloriously turning the argument in their favour by your new emphasis—­“Give every man his deserts, and who shall escape whipping”—­satisfying yourself, and every one else, that good, true, woman-loving Shakspeare must have meant the passage so to be read.  And do you remember a whole afternoon maintaining, that the well-known song of “Billy Taylor” was a serious, true, good, epic poem, in eulogy of the exploits of a glorious woman, and in no way ridiculous to those whose language it spoke; and when we all gave it against you, how you turned round upon the poor author, and said he ought to have the bastinado at the soles of his feet?

And if an occasional disappointment, a small delinquency in some feminine character did now and then happen, and a little sly satire would force its way, quietly too, out of the sides of your mouth, how happily would you instantly disown it, fling it from you as a thing not yours, then catch at it, and sport with it as if you could afford to sport with it, and thereby show it was no serious truth, and pass it off with the passage from Dryden—­