church, provided always that you go as well dressed as your richer neighbors."

Now let us look a little at the effect of this worship of Gentility, under its different names and forms, on the social and domestic life of the classes among which it prevails. The most important effect of any wide-spread and strongly held belief is the ideal it holds up for admiration and imitation. Every great phase in the moral and religious history of mankind has produced an ideal embodying all the virtues and graces which stood highest in the estimation of the men of that time. The general practice may fall infinitely below the ideal, but it will always tend to conform, or at least seem to conform to it; and it will mould the whole moral and intellectual education of the day. We must beware, however, of confounding the nominal or professed ideal of any time with its real, or what may be called its working ideal. In this country, for instance, our professed ideal is that of Christianity, but our working ideals are of quite another sort. The gospel we profess says, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God;" the gospel we believe in, and therefore practise, says, "Seek ye first the kingdom of Mammon, and leave heavenly things to be added unto you," when the earthly ones can no longer avail. The preachers of that gospel do like Mrs. Quickly, when dying Falstaff called upon God. "Now I, to comfort him, bid him he should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet." The Word we assert to be Divine says, "The love of money is the root of all evil;" the Word we obey says, "Without money there is no good." Of course we must profess the Christian version; Scripture must be read in church, and the clergyman must enforce it as Divine truth; but practice is another thing. How could society get on if it attempted to conform its week-day life to Sunday precepts? Such a proceeding would be as absurd as to go to our household or office work in a wedding garment. Only those dangerously singular poeple who have "fads" and "notions," like poor Dorothea in Middlemarch," and insist on trying to live up to what they profess, ever attempt anything so impracticable. But, as was remarked in the case of Dorothea," The great safety of society and domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on; sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them."

66

Let us try, then, to discover what is the real working ideal of Gentility. We have seen that the word "gentle' implied the possession of certain qualities, and looking closer into the matter, we shall find, among many varieties of detail, one prevailing characteristic running through all the types of gentlehood. This is a certain elevation, refinement, and delicacy of feeling and taste, expressed outwardly by a certain dignity and grace of manner, creating an impassable barrier between the gentle and the vulgar. Listen to its description from the master-hand of Burke: "That generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. . . . The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise . . . that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness."

This is the ideal of chivalrous gentlehood. What is the ideal of gentility?

For loyalty it has substituted servility; for grace, affectation; for manly sentiment, sentiment without manliness; for the honor that feels a stain like a wound, the honor that feels only the stain that is found out. Both take their stand upon refinement, and abhor vulgarity; but the refinement of the one is inward, of the other outward. The one means by vulgarity, what is low, coarse, mean, in feeling and taste; the other, only departure from certain conventional modes of dress and manner. True gentlehood carries its own dignity and refinement into any work it undertakes, and sees no degradation except in dishonor,

It cannot be lost by any act not in itself unworthy. But in the eyes of gentility, it is the work or the act itself, not sanctioned by the customs of the "Somebodies," which it shrinks from as a degradation. The imitation of what is supposed to be genteel custom is greater the lower we go in the social scale, within the limits that admit any pretensions to gentility at all; but the subservience to the customs themselves is quite as great let us go as high as we will. To be singular, to depart in any way from the conventionalities of society, is the most serious offence that can be committed by man, and especially by woman; and customary vice is more tolerated than unaccustomed virtue. As John Stuart Mill says in his " Essay on Liberty :”—

I do

In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves, What do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, What is suitable to my posi tion? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still), what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination; it does not occur to them to have any inclination except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done; peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes; until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow their human capacities are withered and starved; they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures: and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.

Now for some instances of the way in which this servility to the yoke of genteel custom tells in practical life. And first in education. It is genteel to send your son to a public school and to college, not because he gets the best education there for sometimes it is the worst for his work in life but because it will bring him into contact with the sons of the Somebodies. If he cannot be a lord, he will at least have been near one. It is genteel to send your daughter to a young ladies' seminary or college; but a Girls' Public School is low, though the teaching may be a hundred times better, and the tone of the school more refined. In fact, gentility does not recognize girls any more than women; and this is probably the reason why the University Local Examinations open to girls are so thinly attended. What genteel mother or school-mistress would like to send up her daughters or pupils as "girls"? It is genteel to learn French and music; but apparently gentility does not concern itself with such common things as spelling and grammar; as I am assured by experienced school-mistresses, that young ladies come to them to be "finished" in the above accomplishments, who are incapable of writing a sentence of English correctly. Their parents probably take the same view as a mother from whom a friend of mine was elicit ing her opinions on education: "Some," said she, “lay store by one thing and some by another, but I like the pi-a-ner." Serious study after school-days are over is still more objectionable, for it would incur not only that dreaded stigma of singularity, but worse still, that of strong-mindedness. For is not weakness of mind a part of that delicate and attractive helplessness essential to feminine gentility, and which alone, we are told, has any charm for the masculine heart? Let us, however, warn the young ladies who go in for it, that its charm ceases with youth and beauty; and that the plain woman over thirty, who cannot help herself, is likely, unless she be an heiress, to have to do without any help at all.

After education comes social life. It is of the essence of gentility to seem to be familiar with the classes above your own, and to imitate their habits. Genteel persons are always well versed in the births, deaths, marriages, and divorces of the peerage; but it is unnecessary for

them to trouble themselves about the domestic joys and sorrows of the nobodies who may be their next-door neighbors. It is genteel for the shopkeeper's daughter to ignore her father's shop, for the farmer's daughter to ignore the farm; to make themselves useful in either would be to forfeit that privilege of ladylike idleness which is, as it were, the Hall-mark of feminine gentility. There are hundreds of families in this country with daughters whose health, tempers, and spirits would be amazingly improved by a little useful, regular work; but gentility demands that servants should be kept to do for them what they would be the better for doing for themselves. So the father toils early and late; never sees his children by daylight in winter; never shares their pleasures in summer; wears away prematurely, perhaps, under this grinding labor, that his daughters may not contaminate their gentility or soil their dainty fingers with the vulgarity of work. But all this slavery is often insufficient to keep them in the genteel luxury of idleness during his life, and secure them in the continuance of it by due provision after his death. To train them to provide for themselves would be horribly ungenteel, unless by husband-hunting- the only profession open to genteel young ladies. If unsuccessful in that, the daughters remain weary, and too often soured and disappointed idlers in their father's house, eating their hearts out, if they have any vigor of character or intellect, in the enforced dependence and vacuity of their lives: sometimes seeking excitement in fastness, sometimes in some form of pietism-ritualistic or evangelical; more often, at present, in the former; for think what delightful variety of occupation it offers in its multiplied services, in its need of richlyadorned altars, and embroidered vestments, and best of all in its confessional securing, for one hour, at least, the possession of a masculine ear into which to pour the troubles and difficulties of the feminine soul! Then comes the father's death, and these helpless, untrained women must take their choice between genteel starvation or the work for bread, for which they have been sedulously unfitted. The occupation they generally rush into is the one of all others where their unfitness can do the most mischief - that of teaching, or rather professing to teach; but that is of little importance compared with the comfort derived from the feeling that they can be governesses without quite losing hold of the skirts of gentility. It is clear that this is a providential arrangement for the benefit of the "Somebodies" whose daughters must be taught and "finished" at home. The governess hangs, like Mahomet's coffin, between the earth of the vulgar and the heaven of gentility, receiving some reflected honor, perhaps, from the first, but excluded from the pleasures of either. Sometimes, though "hard and rare," she is lifted into the heaven itself by some strange matrimonial miracle; and then, if she have the proper sense of genteel dignity which will make her conceal her antecedents, and let no one suspect that she had been able to stand alone and earn an independence, she may take her place among the "select," and sit among the deities of the genteel firmament on equal

terms.

These, however, are only the exceptional few. The many have to eat the bread of dependence, bitter as dust and ashes to the taste; or enter upon the struggle for life almost as hopelessly as one who should strive to keep his head above water without having learnt to swim. From first to last they are the victims of gentility.

Before leaving the subject of gentility, I must say a few words about its nomenclature. We have seen that the terms "woman" and "girl" are excluded from it. I observe that by speakers and writers of the other sex they are often replaced by the word "female," which is not distinctive of the human species, but is the general indication of sex whether in man or beast. I must say that I strongly object to an appellation which can be given with equal correctness to my cat or my dog, as to me. But everyone who is not a female is a lady; as I learnt from the laborer's wife whom I had addressed as "my good woman" and who indignantly assured me that she was a lady, and no more a "good woman " than I was myself.

Even lower in the social scale we may find the same objection to the term "woman," to judge from the anecdote of the charitable visitor who found four families living in the four corners of one room, and who, on remarking that it was overcrowded, was assured by one of the inhabitants that it was quite comfortable now, the lady who used to live in the middle having died last week. Since every woman is to be called a lady, I wish every man could be called a lord, and then

The grand old name of gentleman,
Defamed by every charlatan,
And soiled by all ignoble use,

might be reserved for him alone

To whom a thousand memories call;

Not being less but more than all

The gentleness he seemed to be;

But seemed the thing he was, and joined

Each office of the social hour

To noble manners, as the flower

And native growth of noble mind.

There is an abbreviation of that grand old name, which in its elimination of syllables so happily symbolizes the elimination of the qualities expressed by them, that I would suggest the extension of its use from the small class to whom it is now applied to the whole species in which these qualities are conspicuous by their absence. I mean the word "gent." Of the species I would designate by it, it cannot be said that they are gentle in any sense of the term, unless it be, unhappily, by birth. The essence of gentle manners is self-restraint out of consideration to others; but the distinguishing mark of the "gent" is self-assertion, self-indulgence, in total disregard of others. The essence of gentle breeding is culture and the refinement which springs from culture; but the "gent" is innocent of all culture except that of his mustaches. It may be said of him, in the words of one of our old writers: "He hath more gentleschippe in his hat than in his head." Refinement to him means only luxury of a more or less expensive sort. His dress and general equipments may be according to the strictest fashion of the Somebodies, but his tastes and pursuits are those of the Somebodies' grooms. His literature, like theirs, consists of the facts of the sporting papers, and the fiction of the sensational novel. His amusements are of the same order, except that the noble sport of pigeon-shooting is above the groom's means, and, let us hope, below his humanity. Both travel the same road, with only the difference between the first-class and third-class carriage. The grace of the "gent," if he have any, is not unbought, for it is due to his tailor and perfumer; and he has no "flower of noble manners," for his manners are only the conventional forms of his own set, put on with his dress to go into company, and dropped at home as superfluous expenditure. He is, to quote "Middlemarch" once more - and the temptation is irresistible "accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about families." And manliness is as little to be found in him as gentle-, manliness. He wants its first characteristic self-government. Instead of being a law unto himself, he prides himself on letting his desires be a law unto him, and thinks himself a fine fellow when most a slave to the appetites of his lower nature; to him "a woman is only an animal, and that not of the higher sort;" and the only protection he offers to her weakness is in itself the deadliest insult. As he wears the outer garb of a gentleman, and is at heart a snob, so does he wear the outward semblance of a man, and is, after all, but a brute in disguise.

I am sorry to be obliged to confess that the "gent " has a female, whom I should denominate the lady-gent, but that in the English of Chaucer "gent" was an adjective specially applied to the female sex, and signifying all those qualities of softness, elegance, refinement, delicacy of feeling, which are entirely absent in the "gent" species. The female gent has as little womanliness and gentle-womanliness as her male compeer of manliness or gentleman

liness. She is as destitute of true culture, culture of intellect, culture of taste, culture of moral sentiment, as servile in her deference to the Somebodies of her sphere, as indolent in exacting servility from those she looks upon as nobodies. In one thing only her standard differs from his, but it is a vital difference: she is not required to be vicious as well as frivolous. There are vicious women, alas! in every grade of society; but - and let us thank God for it vice has not yet been made one of their titles to distinction; and even among the "gents" themselves no woman has yet been called a "muff" because she resists her animal propensities instead of indulging them, and exercises the self-control of a human being instead of the license of the brutes.

It will have become apparent from the above definitions that the gents of both sexes must not be looked for in one class of society only, they are found in all which have any pretensions to gentility. Their outward semblance differs; the inner man is the same. George IV., instead of being the first gentleman (alas, for the ignoble use of the word), was really only the first gent in Europe —

By blood a king, at heart a clown.

There is a story told that Ben Jonson, being sick and in great distress, supplicated for help from King Charles I., who sent him only ten guineas. "His Majesty has sent me this," said the indignant poet, "because I am poor and live in an alley. Tell him that his soul lives in an alley." How many are those who dwell outwardly in palaces, but whose souls live in an alley! How many again are there who live and toil, from the cradle to the grave, in the dark alleys of this world, whose souls are all the while dwelling in palaces, palaces of crystalline truth and purity, of lofty thought, of large sympathies, through which the free air and light of heaven sweep, "keeping far off each thing of sin and guilt!" These are Nature's gentlemen and gentlewomen. Whenever we meet and recognize them let us bow before them reverently. They are the nobility of God's own creation.

We will go on now to the second idol of society that we have to deal with, i. e., Femininity, by which the problem of genteel life is complicated in the case of women. Femininity is, as I have said, the offspring of gentility. Out of the classes which aspire to being genteel we hear nothing about it. The laborer, the mechanic, the small trader, know that their wives and daughters must take their share of work in keeping the family; and the question is not what work is feminine, but what work a woman can get paid for doing. As a rule, to which the legislation prohibiting the working of women in coal mines is, I think, the solitary exception, the perception by men of the unfeminine character of any kind of labor, arises and grows very keen only when the labor is remunerative, and carries with it any social privilege or dignity. No illpaid or unpaid drudgery, however hard or coarse, has been too hard or coarse for women. On the contrary, it is assigned to her because it is distasteful to the stronger sex. The lordly savage reserves to himself the hunting and fighting for his family, not to spare the weakness of his squaw, but because hunting and fighting are his masculine pleasures. He leaves to her toil quite as hard, but unrelieved by any agreeable excitement. I have seen the same thing among civilized men. Many a time I have met a German peasant walking leisurely, smoking his pipe, unincumbered by any burden, and followed by his womankind, staggering under a load of hay or vegetables or fagots, which almost concealed the human beast of burden from view. I have seen twenty women harnessed to a barge and towing it against the stream of the Rhine; no man put his shoulder into the rope-harness in their stead, and bade them stand aside from work so unfitted for their sex. On the Italian side of the Alps the heaviest burdens are carried by women, and it is called faccenda di donna, women's work. Only the other day did we not hear from the seat of war in Ashantee, that the women are the best baggage carriers, and keep up with the line of march with a box of ammunition on their heads and a baby on their hips? It is a comfort to hear

also that they have reserved to themselves the right to whip the men who refuse to fight.

Ladies who desire to study and practise medicine are told that it is unfeminine and unladylike, besides being too laborious for their sex, and are urged instead to become nurses. Yet the nurse must undertake the care of both sexes, while the female practitioner attends only women and children. The strain upon the nerves and physical strength, the violence done to delicacy, the necessity of witnessing painful and disgusting sights, are greater in the case of the nurse than that of the physician, and are not relieved, as in the latter, by the strong interest of a scientific pursuit; while many of the offices which have to be performed by her are in themselves of so repulsive a character, to any one not bred to menial service, that only strong affections or enthusiasm could overcome the disgust attending them; but then, neither high pay nor social position are to be attained by the nurse, while both are claimed by the physician. It has, therefore, been decided that it is highly unfeminine, - nay, revolting to every feeling of womanly delicacy, - for a woman to be a physician, but most feminine to be a nurse, especially in military hospitals, where all the patients are men. I heartily agree that it is feminine; that the care of the sick, like the care of children, is especially women's work; and I hope if ever we are forced to have a conscription for military service, there will be a conscription of women for the service of the hospitals. But let it be acknowledged that it is equally women's work to fill both departments in the care of the sick of their own sex, that of the doctor as well as that of the nurse, and that the one which requires the greater knowledge, the better trained intellect, is assuredly not that least fitted for a gentlewoman.

-

To return from this digression to the code of Femininity. as existing in genteel circles where this idol is worshipped. Its guiding principle is the law already found in the code of gentility that the genteel woman should be idle and useless. It is essentially feminine, as we all know, to spend the morning in shopping, the afternoon in visiting, the evening in party going or giving; and therefore we must suppose not incompatible with those domestic duties which, we are assured, are the sole end and aim of a woman's life, though the preparation for them by her education, and the performance of them after it is finished and the young lady is pronounced to be "out," must be conducted in some transcendental manner invisible to the vulgar eye. At least very competent authorities, after careful investigation, have been unable to discover any traces of them. But she is in danger of reprobation as unfeminine, and unfitted for wifely and maternal duties, who ventures to devote the same amount of time to a serious pursuit, or to paid or unpaid work outside domestic life, even when no such life is hers or possible to her. More than a quarter of a century ago Sydney Smith assured the world that it was in no danger of seeing a mother desert her infant for a quadratic equation, but the world has not taken as much comfort in the matter as it might; and though a woman may now get a smattering of a good many subjects, including the ologies, without incurring ridicule as a blue, the bugbear of Femininity still sits at the entrance of every path to higher education, to greater usefulness, to remunerative employment, and warns her off under penalty of losing that charm of weakness and genteel helplessness which alone, it whispers, can win for her the chivalrous love and protection of

men.

The second great principle in the code of Femininity is also adopted from that of gentility, i. e., that it is feminine to do what everybody also does, that is, everybody that counts for somebody. Accordingly, many things that were considered unfeminine half a century or even a few years ago are now admitted, or on the point of being admitted, within the pale of feminine action; and, on the other hand, things that were considered feminine at one time, as, for instance, in the Middle Ages, skill in medicine and surgery, are hotly condemned as unfeminine now. To address a public meeting, or deliver a public lecture such as this, would have been till very recently (and is now in some circles) con

sidered shockingly unfeminine; but it is not unfeminine to go on the stage; and to act in private, which often are semipublic theatricals, is accepted not only as feminine, but approved of by the highest authorities of female gentility. For women to mix with men in class-rooms, board-rooms, or committees, is regarded with suspicion, not to say alarm, by the devotees of Femininity; but the most rigorous do not dream of objecting to the mixture of the sexes in any place or scene of amusement, the ball-room, the theatre, or even the hunting-field.

or

Must we, then, be content with these rules of genteel custom as the ultimate tests of what is feminine and unfeminine? Are there no essential and permanent characteristics of conduct and manners by which we may class them as feminine or unfeminine, gentle not genteelungentle? Let us substitute the word "womanly" for "feminine," and see if that will not help us. What constitutes womanliness? Are weakness of body and mind, helplessness, shallowness of thought and knowledge, frivolity of taste and pursuit, absorption in the art of menpleasing, are these, indeed, the essential characteristics of womanhood, and is she who combines them the type of the

--

perfect woman, nobly planned,

To cheer, to comfort, to command?

We must look for the answer somewhat deeper than the surface and conventional rules of society; and going to the constitution of things, ask ourselves what special functions woman has to perform in this world as woman, apart from the function common to all human beings in virtue of their humanity. That function is motherhood, and the characteristics essential to its due performance must be the essential characteristics of true womanhood. It is in her motherliness that we find her womanliness. She may not be, or ever become, a mother, but she cannot be a perfect woman unless she possess all the attributes which belong to perfect motherhood. What, then, are these attributes? First on the list stands tenderness: the mother must above all things be tender and pitiful; for her love is the highest type of human tenderness, the truest symbol of the Divine. Next comes strength: the mother must be strong and helpful; for how else shall she protect and guide the helpless lives clinging to hers? She must be pure, not only with the purity which is ignorance, but with the purity which, knowing evil, abhors it; for is she not the representative to her children of Divine purity? She must be true; for if her children find their trust in her deceived, in whom else will they have faith? She must be a lover and promoter of order; for order in the family is like law in the state; without it there is only anarchy and confusion. She must be just; for children have a keen sense of justice, and will pay respectful and cheerful obedience only to the rule they feel to be just. She must be self-controlling and self-forgetting; for she cannot rule her children unless she can rule herself, and she cannot have that perfect sympathy with them that shares and lives in their life, unless she can forget herself. She must have a high ideal; for how else shall she inspire her children with the love and worship of a goodness, justice, and beauty transcending that of earth? And, finally, she must be crowned with wisdom; for her love must give light as well as warmth; she must be able to guide as well as to cherish. This is the type of the perfect mother, and therefore it is the type of the perfect woman. Here, then, we have the standard we wanted, and may lay down as the rule, whose application admits no exception, that whatever action, pursuit, or profession is incompatible with this type, is unwomanly. Whatever habits of life, or methods of education, tend rather to repress than to cultivate those attributes of perfect womanliness, - tenderness, strength, purity, truth, justice, noble idealism, order, and wisdom, -is a wrong course, and a radically faulty method of education.

I venture to think that a similar test of perfect manliness might be found in the characteristics of perfect fatherhood, which is the special function of men, as motherhood

of women; and on examination they appear to be the same as we have already enumerated, differing only in the manner and circumstances of their exercise, and merging in the common characteristics of the parent, so that if one parent fails the other may supply the place of both. The father, like the mother, must be tender, strong and true, just and pure, self-controlling, self-forgetting, capable of a noble worship, of wisdom to guide and to counsel; and if any habits of life and methods of education hinder or do not cultivate those characteristics of true fatherhood, and therefore of true manhood, may we not safely condemn them as radically wrong and false?

Let us apply this test to our existing systems of education and habits of life for both sexes, as well as to propound reforms in either, and go on to inquire if there be no similarly unchangeable test by which we could also judge of gentlehood in man or woman, whether we can find no principle lying deep below conventional rules, which shall afford us a criterion of the true gentleman, the true gentlewoman."

And first it seems clear that this quality of gentlehood is something superadded to, and resting as its foundation upon true manliness and womanliness. No unmanly man or unwomanly woman can be a gentleman or a gentlewoman in the true sense of the terms. But to that deep and strong root and stem, gentlehood adds the leaf and flower which clothe them in outward beauty. To strength it adds grace; to purity, refinement; to truth, the delicacy of honor; to self-restraint, the ease which is second nature; to noble ideals, noble and beautiful forms. It does not veneer; it polishes. It does not by any artifice make the baser metal look like gold; but it adds to the gold itself the value of exquisite workmanship. Let us apply these tests to the idols of Gentility and Femininity, and they will stand betrayed as by the touch of Ithuriel's spear. Once seen as they truly are, their power over society will be gone forever.

FORGETTING A LANGUAGE.

FACTS frequently come under public notice relating to insoluble mysteries connected with memory, its trustworthiness on some occasions and failure on others. As all newspaper readers are aware, great importance has recently been given to the question whether or not a man can forget a language which he has once learned, and whether a disputed case of personal identity can be either strengthened or weakened thereby. That the knowledge of a language can be effectually driven out of the head for a a time is beyond dispute; the difficulty lies in deciding whether this oblivion is ever permanent, or whether it is traceable to temporary mental maladies. Forgetfulness of languages is only one among many kinds of lapse of memory, some of which are strange and surprising, wholly inexplicable in the present state of science.

From the very nature of the phenomenon, most of the recorded instances apply to persons who know, or have known, two or more languages; in some cases the native tongue had slipped out of the memory, in others that (or those) acquired later in life.

A Highland woman, accustomed to speak English, was placed under the care of Dr. Macintosh, at Edinburgh, for an attack of apoplexy. She so far recovered as to look around her with an appearance of intelligence; but the physician could not make her understand anything he said to her, nor could she answer the most simple question. He therefore hit upon the expedient of directing one of her friends to address her in Gaelic, which she immediately answered with readiness and fluency. How one language can thus be expelled from the brain, and the other retained, is a mystery; the English was in all probability acquired later in life than the Gaelic, and, perhaps, less perfectly; this is the only obtainable clue. The woman recovered the lost language when health returned.

A Lutheran clergyman, settled at Philadelphia, informed

Dr. Rush that Germans and Swedes, of whom he had a considerable number in his congregation, when near death always prayed in their native languages; though some of them, he was convinced, had not spoken those tongues for fifty or sixty years, ever since childhood.

A German lady, married to an English gentleman, spoke English during the greater part of her married life; but at one period, during a protracted illness, she used her native tongue, and could not make herself intelligible to her English attendants except through the aid of her husband as an interpreter.

Dr. Rush mentions the case of an Italian gentleman, who died of yellow fever at New York, and who underwent a remarkable series of mental changes during the malady which terminated his life. He spoke English, which had for some time been his familiar language in America, in the early stage of his illness; during the middle period this was driven out of his brain by French, which he had learned before English; and on the day of his death he spoke only his own native Italian.

A case has been recorded by Dr. Pritchard of a lady who, when suffering under an attack of delirium, spoke a language which nobody around her could understand. It was at length discovered to be Welsh, or something similar. None of her friends could form any conception of the time or manner in which she could have acquired a familiarity with that tongue; but after much inquiry it was ascertained that, in her childhood, she had had as nurse a native of the French province of Brittany, the dialect of which is derived from the same Cymric stock as Welsh. The lady had during those early years learned a good deal of the dialect, but had entirely forgotten it in later life, until her attack of illness produced some inexplicable change in the mental action. This case was in every way remarkable; for the lapse of memory was in the native tongue, while the language brought vividly into action was that which she had only heard during some of her child-years. In all probability it was not really Welsh, but something like it. The same physician gives the particulars of another instance, wherein an English lady, during the progress of recovery from an apoplectic attack, suddenly began to address her attendants in French, and did not resume her native English utterances until convalescent. Here, as in the last-mentioned case, a secondary language for a time overpowered the primary. In what way a former state of mental action is thus revived is a mystery which physicians and metaphysicians are alike unable at present to solve.

Abernethy, the great surgeon, had to attend a man who was born in France, but had spent the greater part of his life in England, and had for many years almost entirely lost the habit of speaking French. An injury in the head brought him under the care of Abernethy, who observed that the man spoke scarcely anything but French during his illness; the other language was for a time in oblivion.

There was a case at St. Thomas's Hospital, some years ago, in which real Welsh, not merely a foreign dialect derived from the same stock, was resuscitated. A patient was in a state of stupor, owing to an injury in the head. On his partial recovery he spoke a language which nobody in the hospital understood, but which on further inquiry was found to be Welsh. Tracing back the man's history, it was ascertained that he was a Welshman, but had not been in his native country for thirty or forty years. During the greater part of his life English had driven Welsh from his mind; but under the influence of his illness Welsh had reasserted itself, and had in its turn driven out the intruder.

ble manner.

Sometimes erudite men lose their acquirements, in a partial degree and for a temporary period, in a very inexplicaDr. Beattie mentions the case of a gentleman who, when suffering from the effects of a blow on the head, lost his knowledge of Greek, as if it had been a concrete something which the blow had knocked out in its entirety. In other instances a special foreign language seems to be selected by the brain, not for expulsion, but for intensified reception. Dr. Gregory met with a case in which a clergyman, while laboring under a disease of the brain, spoke

nothing but Hebrew. This, it was found on inquiry, was the last language which he had learned; it overpowered alike his English, Latin, and Greek when his mind was temporarily thrown off its balance.

In all the above described instances there was a know!edge of two or more languages, and a virtual suppression of one of them during a morbid condition of the brain. The main difference was this: that some of the patients temporarily lost their original native tongue, whereas in other cases an acquired foreign language was the one which suffered eclipse. How far a man can really forget a particular language during all the later half of his life, can never be known unless he suffers under some kind of malady in the mind or brain; something else then assumes the real mas tery over him, and memory undergoes strange evolutions. Other curious instances of forgetfulness are worthy of notice, not relating to a complete language, but to words and names which form the elements of a language when built up into a system.

Dr. Abercrombie records an instance of a gentleman who uniformly called his snuff-box a hogshead. When reminded of the error he probably recognized it, but his tendency was nevertheless in this direction. His physician hypothetically traced the oddity to an early and long-continued association of ideas; the gentleman had been a tobacco merchant in Virginia, and had had his attention well occupied with hogsheads of tobacco and boxes of snuff. This may not be a sufficient explanation, but it was the only one that suggested itself; as he made no similar blunder with other words. Certainly a greater difficulty was presented by the gentleman who always called coals paper and paper coals systematically, as it would appear, transposing the meanings of the two words. Both substances. it is true, are used in lighting a fire; but this fact does not suffice to solve the puzzle.

An inability to remember the names of things sometimes presents itself in a remarkable way. A gentleman, engaged in extensive agricultural affairs, could not remember the spoken names of things, but recognized them directly wher written. He arranged his daily duties accordingly, with a degree of success that could hardly be expected under such strange circumstances. He kept before him in his business room a list of the words which were most likely to occur in his intercourse with his workmen. When any one of his men wished to communicate with him on any subject, the master listened attentively to what was said; the sound of the words did not convey to his mind the idea of the things or commodities signified, but it did suggest to him written words, which he therefore proceeded to consult; the sight of the letters forming those words at once gave him the necessary clue to the meaning. The process was note worthy; the sound of a word, when spoken, suggested the shape of the word when written, and this shape suggested the idea or mental picture of the thing signified. This ap pears to have been a permanent peculiarity of mind, or at least, of long continuance, unconnected with any particular malady. In another case, which came under the notice of Dr. Gregory, a lady, consequent on an apoplectic fit, lost her memory of names, but retained it for things. Although a good housewife, she could only direct her servants and tradespeople by pointing to the things concerning which she meant to speak. All went on well in regard to the other words of a sentence: but when she came to the names of things, memory failed her, and she could only convey her meaning by pointing.

A singular variation from this type is a forgetfulness of the names of persons—not that mere heedlessness which leads some persons to speak of Mr. Thing'emy or Mr. What's-his-name, but a real inability to call to mind the particular word or name belonging to a particular person. A gentleman, after a brain attack, knew his friends perfectly, but could not remember their names. Walking one day in the street, he met an acquaintance to whom he was very anxious to communicate something relating to a mut ual friend. After various ineffectual attempts to make him understand, he at last seized him by the arm, and dragged him through several streets to the house of the