the elementary state of the altruistic virtues, distinguishable as the sickness and writhings of our egoism to cast its first slough.  Idea is there.  The funny part of it is our finding it in books of fiction composed for payment.  Manifestly this lady did not ‘chameleon’ her pen from the colour of her audience:  she was not of the uniformed rank and file marching to drum and fife as gallant interpreters of popular appetite, and going or gone to soundlessness and the icy shades.

Touches inward are not absent:  ’To have the sense of the eternal in life is a short flight for the soul.  To have had it, is the soul’s vitality.’  And also:  ’Palliation of a sin is the hunted creature’s refuge and final temptation.  Our battle is ever between spirit and flesh.  Spirit must brand the flesh, that it may live.’

You are entreated to repress alarm.  She was by preference light-handed; and her saying of oratory, that ’It is always the more impressive for the spice of temper which renders it untrustworthy,’ is light enough.  On Politics she is rhetorical and swings:  she wrote to spur a junior politician:  ’It is the first business of men, the school to mediocrity, to the covetously ambitious a sty, to the dullard his amphitheatre, arms of Titans to the desperately enterprising, Olympus to the genius.’  What a woman thinks of women, is the test of her nature.  She saw their existing posture clearly, yet believed, as men disincline to do, that they grow.  She says, that ’In their judgements upon women men are females, voices of the present (sexual) dilemma.’  They desire to have ’a still woman; who can make a constant society of her pins and needles.’  They create by stoppage a volcano, and are amazed at its eruptiveness.  ’We live alone, and do not much feel it till we are visited.’  Love is presumably the visitor.  Of the greater loneliness of women, she says:  ’It is due to the prescribed circumscription of their minds, of which they become aware in agitation.  Were the walls about them beaten down, they would understand that solitariness is a common human fate and the one chance of growth, like space for timber.’  As to the sensations of women after the beating down of the walls, she owns that the multitude of the timorous would yearn in shivering affright for the old prison-nest, according to the sage prognostic of men; but the flying of a valiant few would form a vanguard.  And we are informed that the beginning of a motive life with women must be in the head, equally with men (by no means a truism when she wrote).  Also that ’men do not so much fear to lose the hearts of thoughtful women as their strict attention to their graces.’  The present market is what men are for preserving:  an observation of still reverberating force.  Generally in her character of the feminine combatant there is a turn of phrase, like a dimple near the lips showing her knowledge that she was uttering but a tart measure of the truth.  She had always too much lambent humour to be the dupe of the passion wherewith, as she says, ’we lash ourselves into the persuasive speech distinguishing us from the animals.’