“Madam, these words are chanticleer’s, not mine;
  I honour dames, and think their sex divine!”

No human being ever collected so many of the good sayings and doings of women as you, Eusebius.  I am not, then, surprised that, having read the “Rights of Women,” you are come to the determination to take up “The Wrongs of Women.”  The wrongs of women, alas!

  ——­“Adeo sunt multa loquacem
  Delassare valent Fabium.”

And so you write to me, to supply you with some sketches from nature, instances of the “Wrongs of Woman.”  Ah me!  Does not this earth teem with them—­the autumnal winds moan with them?  The miseries want a good hurricane to sweep them off the land, and the dwellings the “foul fiend” hath contaminated.  Man’s doing, and woman’s suffering, and thence even arises the beauty of loveliness—­woman’s patience.  In the very palpable darkness besetting the ways of domestic life, woman’s virtue walks forth loveliest—­

  “Virtue gives herself light, through darkness for to wade.”

The gentle Spenser, did he not love woman’s virtue, and weep for her wrongs?  You, Eusebius, were wont ever to quote his tender lament:—­

  “Naught is there under heaven’s wide hollowness
  That moves more clear compassion of mind
  Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness
  By envy’s frowns or fortune’s freaks unkind. 
  I, whether lately through her brightness blind,
  Or through allegiance and fast fealty,
  Which I do owe unto all womankind,
  Feel my heart pierced with so great agony,
  When such I see, that all for pity I could die.”

This melting mood will not long suit your mercurial spirit.  You used to say that the fairies were all, in common belief, creatures feminine, hence deservedly called “good people,”—­that they made the country merry, and kept clowns in awe, and were better for the people’s morals than a justice of the peace.  They tamed the savage, and made him yield, and bow before feminine feet.  Sweet were they that hallowed the brown hills, and left tokens of their visits, blessing all seasons to the rustic’s ear, whispering therein softly at nightfall—­

  “Go, take a wife unto thy arms, and see
  Winter and brownie-hills shall have a charm for thee.”

Such was your talk, Eusebius, passing off your discontent of things that are, into your inward ideal, rejoicing in things unreal, breaking out into your wildest paradox—­“What is the world the better for all its boasted truth!  It has belied man’s better nature.  Faith, trust, belief, is the better part of him, the spiritual of man; and who shall dare to say that its creations, visible, or invisible, all felt, acknowledged as vital things, are not realities?” All this—­in your contempt for beadles and tip-staves, even overseers and churchwardens, and all subdividing machinery of country government, that, when it came in and fairly established itself, drove away the “good people,”