which keep the really numerically better-half of the population in a state of slavery.  If he had been a lawyer!  It must be a lawyer’s initiative—­a lawyer’s Bill.  Mr. Percy Dacier also spoke well, as might have been expected, and his uncle’s compliment to him was merited.  Should you meet him sound him.  He has read for the Bar, and is younger than Mr. Redworth.  The very young men and the old are our hope.  The middleaged are hard and fast for existing facts.  We pick our leaders on the slopes, the incline and decline of the mountain—­not on the upper table-land midway, where all appears to men so solid, so tolerably smooth, save for a few excrescences, roughnesses, gradually to be levelled at their leisure; which induces one to protest that the middle-age of men is their time of delusion.  It is no paradox.  They may be publicly useful in a small way.  I do not deny it at all.  They must be near the gates of life—­the opening or the closing—­for their minds to be accessible to the urgency of the greater questions.  Otherwise the world presents itself to them under too settled an aspect—­unless, of course, Vesuvian Revolution shakes the land.  And that touches only their nerves.  I dream of some old Judge!  There is one—­if having caught we could keep him.  But I dread so tricksy a pilot.  You have guessed him—­the ancient Puck!  We have laughed all day over the paper telling us of his worrying the Lords.  Lady Esquart congratulates her husband on being out of it.  Puck ‘biens ride’ and bewigged might perhaps—­except that at the critical moment he would be sure to plead allegiance to Oberon.  However, the work will be performed by some one:  I am prophetic:—­when maidens are grandmothers!—­when your Tony is wearing a perpetual laugh in the unhusbanded regions where there is no institution of the wedding-tie.’

For the reason that she was not to participate in the result of the old Judge’s or young hero’s happy championship of the cause of her sex, she conceived her separateness high aloof, and actually supposed she was a contemplative, simply speculative political spirit, impersonal albeit a woman.  This, as Emma, smiling at the lines, had not to learn, was always her secret pride of fancy—­the belief in her possession of a disengaged intellect.

The strange illusion, so clearly exposed to her correspondent, was maintained through a series of letters very slightly descriptive, dated from the Piraeus, the Bosphorus, the coasts of the Crimea, all more or less relating to the latest news of the journals received on board the yacht, and of English visitors fresh from the country she now seemed fond of calling ‘home.’  Politics, and gentle allusions to the curious exhibition of ‘love in marriage’ shown by her amiable host and hostess:  ’these dear Esquarts, who are never tired of one another, but courtly courting, tempting me to think it possible that a fortunate selection and a mutual deference may subscribe to human happiness:—­filled