It grows along thy amber curls, to shine Brighter than elsewhere. Now, look straight before, And from thy soul, which fronts the future so, Teach me to hope for what the angels know That, less than we have, thou hast learnt of God. New springs of life are gushing everywhere. It is, we imagine, almost universally accepted that to write the Sonnet excellently is about the most difficult performance in the domain of poetry. At any rate, it is the one branch of the art least frequently successfully achieved. It is questionable whether we have more than three or four English poets who can be credited with the highest execution in this respect. But to these three or four must be added the name of Mrs. Browning. After Shakespeare, we should be inclined to maintain that she is the equal of any. For proof of this, let the reader turn to her " Sonnets from the Portuguese," which, under a disguised name, are her own sonnets. To us they seem to fulfil all the requisites of the sonnet, including strength, imagery, sweetness, proportion or art, and massiveness. They are certainly equal to all of Wordsworth's and most of Milton's. The sonnet, with the great poets, has been generally most successful when personal to themselves. They appear to have caught their sion and confined it within bounds, so that the sonnet, in master hands, becomes, as it were, "foursquare to all the winds that blow." There is no weak corner - - all is solid and compact. pas These sonnets by Mrs. Browning bear upon them her own very distinct individuality, and as a means of setting her truly before her readers, are more explanatory than any other of her writings. Let us study them for a moment. In the first, the poet presents us with a picture of her mind at the period when she looked for Death as the release from a mortal imprisonment, whose shadow was laid deeply athwart her. The sonnet is exceedingly fine. And is as follows: I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young; And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, "Guess now who holds thee?" " Death," I said. But there, The silver answer rang, "Not Death, but Love!" Then comes a description of love, whose power nothing, can conquer, and which man is helpless to destroy. Spirits "but vow the faster for the stars." Yet, following on, we come to a declaration of her own unworthiness, on the part of the singer, to be thus discovered and made blessed. The gloom is still too heavy about her, and will not be dispersed. She is fain to cry What hast thou to do, With looking from thy lattice lights at me, A poor, tired, wand'ring singer, singing through The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree? The chrism is on thine head, on mine, the dew, And Death must dig the level where these agree. How beautiful and how pathetic are these lines! And the strain is continued, with no diminution of sadness, through several succeeding sonnets. The soul has found its counterpart, yet bids it begone; the proffered happiness is too great for it; it must not be. "Go from me!" is now the cry; but the spirit is evidently yielding to the conqueror for it adds, The widest land Doom takes to part us leaves thy heart in mine, With pulses that beat double. The record of life progresses, and the great argument is discussed, "Can it be right to give what I can give?" Witness the seventh and immediately subsequent sonnets, for their dissection of the love passion, as it thrills through and permeates the being. Truly autobiographical, indeed, are these confessions; the seal of genuine experience is upon each one with its alternating hopes and fears, and its unfolding of a woman's heart. Surely finer subjective poetry than this was never written. The poet speaks to us without veils, and we listen eagerly to the revelation. From the sadness and gloom we emerge at length into daylight; the cypress has yielded to the rose. Love is justified; it asks for and gives all. Troths are exchanged, and the singer has given up the grave for the sake of him who is now to be her life. We then see the plan of the whole work. First, we had the soul expecting death, then Life revivified by Love; then the grave put behind the soul; and lastly, comes the sequel, the marriage of those whose history has been traced in the series of poems now about to conclude. Thus the poet muses, as she stands midway in her existence the past behind her, the blissful future immediately in view : "My future will not copy my fair past." I wrote that once; and, thinking at my side I seek no copy now of life's first half; Leave here the pages with long musing curled, New angel mine, unhoped for in the world! But to show what the wonderful depth of woman's love is, and to reach what seems the absolute fulness of human expression, we have the following triumphant song at the close of this personal history we have been examining: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith I love thee with a love I seemed to lose We have thus glanced briefly through this remarkable series of psychological poems, one of the most precious bequests which a poet can leave us, revealing, as they do so clearly, the inner life of the writer. After their perusal, just as in the case of a study of Tennyson's " In Memoriam," we feel that we have done more towards grasping the character of the poet than we are able to do by an intimate acquaintance with all her other works. The unity of the Sonnets from the Portuguese " is precise and definite; no link in the chain can be withdrawn, without destroying the value of the whole. There is no hesitancy in the utterance; we here see Mrs. Browning at her highest, when she has passed through the novitiate of her art, and risen to the perfection of song. The sonnets glow with rapture, are exquisite in expression, and perfect in form. Taken collectively, and in the light of the one passion which they trace, from its inception to its culmination, we know noth ing anywhere to compare with them. Intellect and passion are combined in them in an equal degree, and together fused into wondrous music. The love poetry from the hand which wrote thus passionately and including compositions other than the sonnets would in itself, and in its entirety, form a complete study, for its variety, sweetness, and pathos. But there yet remain to us some remarks on the work upon which, chiefly, the author's fame is conceded to rest "Aurora Leigh." A wide diversity of opinion exists with regard to its merits, and to the position which it ought to occupy in modern literature. The writer herself, in inscribing it to her cousin, described it as the most mature of all her works, and the one into which her "highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." Our own view of it is that, as a whole, it is somewhat inconsequent; it lacks unity, for a poem of such magnitude; but even in these higher respects, though not perfect, it is equal to anything produced this generation. When we come to regard it in other aspects, however, our praise is almost necessarily unbounded. It is a poem which we could imagine Shakespeare dropping a tear over for its humanity. Its intense subjectivity will exempt its influence on men from decay. Were we not amazed with the beauty and fulness of its poetry, we should be struck with its philosophy. The following lines might almost be taken as a digest of the whole teaching of Carlyle: Get leave to work In this world-'tis the best you get at all; For foreheads," men say "crowns," and so we are crowned, The author's views on Art are set forth with some fulness. Art, we presume, notwithstanding all the darkness which has been cast around it by much speaking, means (if we are bound to describe it as concisely as possible) the closest and most perfect realization of the various forms of Truth which it is in the power of man to attain. Some such idea as this certainly possessed the mind of Mrs. Browning; and it was her opinion that that was real Art which assisted in any degree to lead back the soul to contemplate God, the supreme Artist of the universe. Yet Art, even with her, was not the highest, the ultimate Art is much, but Love is more! O Art, my Art, thou'rt much, but Love is more! Art symbolizes heaven, but Love is God And makes heaven. As a solution for many of the problems of social life' "Aurora Leigh" must be pronounced a failure. It exhibits a wonderful sensitiveness to the evils resulting from the imperfect conditions of society, but it shows no powers of reconstruction. Its principal attraction, after its poetry, which stands supremely first therein, lies in the series of pictures of human life, in its varied phases, which it presents, and also in its power of analysis of the human heart. Sincerity is also a prominent characteristic of the revelations which it makes; it is an autobiography in which nothing is kept back, and the inner workings of a woman's heart were never more clearly transcribed. Unevenness characterizes the narrative, but daring speculation and rich thoughts are embraced within the lines. There are more passages of lofty and impassioned poetry within the covers of this one book than are contained in any single lengthy modern poem of which we have knowledge. From the level of occasional mediocrity we pass on to sublime imaginative heights. In this poem we have a vantage ground from which we survey the panorama of human life, illumined by the sun of genius. To attempt to extract its beauties would be futile; it is a garden in which every flower of sweetness blooms. Its aroma is amongst the most fragrant in literature. Or again, to change the figure, the poem is like a mine which yields more and more as the hu man digger presses it. When he first enters into p sion he beholds the faint yellow streaks which betoke golden treasure, but it is the subsequent labor which b to light the actual El Dorado. One grand result of Mrs. Browning's literary caree been to disprove the assertion that women cannot true poetry. Such a taunt may be considered as dis of forever. If we are to believe tradition, Sappho the finest lyrics the world has seen; but our own ge tion has beheld woman's genius take even a wider r No woman, as yet, has written a great epic, or dra poetry of the highest order; but how restricted is the ber of men who have done this! What there is in th ure of woman, however, to forbid her rivalling eve highest, we do not know; all we can say is, that g the dower of the gods, in its most transcendent man tion, has, up to the present, been bestowed upon ma may be, nevertheless, that we shall yet see the female plement of our great men only, it cannot be ch unless woman have a wider personal sphere. Still most interesting to note that, in this ninteenth centur has demonstrated the possibility of a future eq What novelist, for instance, has more conclusively good his claim to rank almost with the highest, than Eliot? How many of our artists have excelled Ros heur in her own special gifts? What writer has ex a greater breadth of imagination and power than G Sand? Lastly, where is the poetry which can be ered superior to Mrs. Browning's? In poetry, fictio art, at any rate, man has little supremacy to boast the last forty or fifty years. We do not mean th genius may not have over-topped, in individual case of woman, but the difference has not been so perce as in past ages. Woman is now more abreast of Her altitude is no longer, when compared with him of Mont Blanc beside Chimborazo. It is more than able that we shall never behold a female Homer, Pl Shakespeare; but anything short of these woman and most probably will, become. Her passion is as if her ambition be not so great, as man's. As her s thies widen and she bears more of that burden world, experience, which, in its greatest depths ar extended scope, has hitherto largely pertained to m she will produce work which shall be as potent and ful as his, and possess the same inherent powers of i tality. Meanwhile, let us be just to what she has already a plished. A dispassionate examination of the poe Elizabeth Barrett Browning can, we maintain, only this result that she is the equal of any poet of cu in genius. In particular qualities she may appear i to some who could be cited, and whose names will in ibly suggest themselves; but in others she is as indub their superior; and, until we can decide who is g Byron or Wordsworth, Shelley or Coleridge, Hon Shakespeare, we care not to assign her precise pe One thing is certain, however: her immortality is a she stands already crowned. As long as one heart throbs for another she will be held in high es Her poetry is that which refines, chastens, and ele We could think that with herself, as with one of her acters, "Some grand, blind Love came down, and g her out, and clasped her with a kiss; she learnt Ge way." And who were her teachers? Can we ask t one who said, "Earth's crammed with heaven, and common bush afire with God?" The emerald beaut thousand valleys, embroidered by the silver threads of andering rivers; the grandeur of the everlasting bills their lofty and majestic calm; the terrible rolling o restless and unsatisfied sea; the stars that at mid shine, looking down upon us like the eyes of those we above all, the whisper of God as it thrills through the man heart these were her informers and teachers. sources of her eminent inspiration. She sang of all that men might be nobler, freer, and purer. Her ap osis follows of Divine right with that of all the leader mankind: God endowed her, and we exalt her. to SEX IN EDUCATION. DR. E. CLARKE, Professor of Materia Medica at Harvard' the American Cambridge, has published an able, quiet little book, founded on an unusually great experience of this subject, which is, we believe, circulating very rapidly among the class for whom it is intended, the managers of national schools, both in America and England. Much of it needs to be discussed rather in a medical journal than in one like the Spectator, as being too strictly professional for everybody's reading, but the results at which the doctor arrives may be stated anywhere. His argument is, in part, no doubt based on special American experience, but most of it is universal, and will well deserve the attention of the more fervid advocates of what is called the Women's Rights Movement. Dr. Clarke does not deny in any way the equality of the male and female brain, indeed, he asserts it with rather more energy than Europeans will be willing to allow. He denies, as we understand him, that there is any difference of mental capacity at all between the sexes, holds that girls might, as far as success is concerned, be educated not only as well as boys, but in precisely the same things. A girl can study, say Euclid, as hard as a boy, and possibly with more success. Only if she studies it in the same way and at the same time, if she really works as her comrade works, from fifteen to eighteen, steadily and persistently, she will pay for her success a tremendous physiological price. She will, if she does not lose her health, as she will do in most cases about two years after her education has terminated, lose her right of maternity, or and this is the more important point - will produce a breed of children all nerves and troubles, who will never, from want of physical stamina, take their proper place in life. Already it is painful to doctors from New England to travel in Nova Scotia, and watch the bright, healthy, cherry-cheeked little animals, who may not have half the precocious intelligence of the New Englander, but who will be as strong as if they had lived in England all their lives, and who, we may add, like other barbarous races, may one day teach their superiors that the world is not governed by brains, but by physical power. Punch's amusing sketch of the strong lout of ten who tells his clever schoolfellow, "I can't talk French, but I can punch your head," has a substratum of bitter truth underneath the jest. It is not the kind of study, according to Dr. Clarke, which women have to fear, but the method and the time of study. Boys can persistently study on from twelve to twenty-one for six hours a day, and if they have good diet and plenty of exercise will not physically suffer; Lut girls should stop heavy intellectual work from fifteen to eighteen, and either cease to work altogether, or work half-time, or setting aside a rather absurd and thoroughly injurious conventionality, work only when they know themselves to be in full health for working. If they do not, they themselves will not have the full intellectual benefit of their labor, will pay heavily in health, and will rear a sickly race, who will be all nerves, fretfulness, and irritability, and, as a normal rule, tending towards stupidity. That is the normal rule, stated by Dr. Clarke, of course more plainly; and though we suspect he is speaking of an abnormal race mainly, the New Englander, who is injured by climate and by a peculiar diet at least as much as by any system of education, still every one devoted to education will read his book with profit, and, we think, more or less conviction. It is with his results, however, that we have to deal; and these, if accepted, would revolutionize almost every modern attempt at equal education, would, for example, abolish mixed classes altogether, as no school could have two sets of working hours; would knock the Cambridge examinations on the head, as enforcing severe labor just at the wrong time of life; and would substitute for all our present arrangements for educating girls by hard work up to fifteen, a mild, fitful, and semi voluntary educaion up to nineteen, after which thorough education may begin again, to be continued as long as circumstances will allow. It follows that women's education must be totally separate from men's, that no competition between the sexes can be allowed, and that in the majority of cases no thorough education can be given to women at all. If they cannot study until they are married they will not study till they are forty, at which time the disposition both of men and women towards study has greatly diminished. Of course, a class, and a large class, of women will study all the same, as, for instance, teachers; but after all, one main end of education is to produce a continuing and therefore accumulative civilization, an hereditary disposition towards culture, and any system which is successful only with spinsters, even if they take to teaching, is in great part sterile. It does good to one generation, but not to all generations, and is comparatively useless. That will be denied, we know, in a shoal of letters; but anybody who marks the difference between the lower class in Scotland, where education has lasted two hundred years, and the lower class in Essex, where men of the same race have been educated for only one generation, will know that it is true. And this brings us to the only remedy which those who believe Dr. Clarke, and at the same time believe in female education, will be likely to accept, or even consider. His remedy, the separate education of each girl according very much to her own will, would not work, and would be wholly fatal to collegiate life of any kind. But has it ever been fairly proved that Mr. Chadwick's theory once so widely discussed, and in our experience so true, that half-time teaching was, for boys, so much more valuable than wholetime teaching is, if applied a little later in life, wholly groundless? Is it not possible for both sexes, but more especially for girls, to make the quality of teaching more valuable than the quantity, or even than the energy, of teaching? We believe it is. We know that it answers in the best schools for young lads, and we can see no reason whatever why it should not answer in good schools for young women. Half-time is more expensive, more troublesome, and, with very lazy people, less satisfactory, but with the only classes who really benefit by protracted education it might be productive of the best result. Nothing whatever is gained by driving a clever lad six hours a day till he is made stupid by the pressure, and with girls the system is not only negatively useless, but very often positively injurious. If girls are to be thoroughly educated - and this is one of the women's rights to which we cordially adhere a little common-sense must be displayed in the method of education; and that common-sense is likely, after a little while, and under an eager competition, to be as wanting in England as in America, where, by the testimony of so many tutors and so many physiologists, a distinct lack of sense on the part of trustees and doctors is visibly affecting one of the picked races of mankind, the true Yankee, who has governed and taught till now, but is giving place to his fuller-blooded, but indefinitely inferior Western brother. One Adams is worth, for governing purposes, shall we say five tons or five hundred tons of Andrew Johnsons? - but it is not an Adams which female education, if so hotly pressed in girlhood, is likely to produce, but an etiolated, rickety man, with no digestion, feeble nerves, and a tendency to morbid activity, rather than to genuine power of brain. ON THE SIDE OF THE MISTRESSES. "I ALSO am a woman;" though, on the whole, I ought simply to say, "I am a woman: for only one of those whom old-fashioned grammarians describe as belonging to the worthier gender could have written as one lately did in this magazine "On the Side of the Maids." I am sure it cannot be that one who is familiar with the woes of the gentler sex can have thus overlooked the sorrows of the mistresses of the day. The writer must be one of those inexperienced young men who go up and down the country, upsetting all that has been held sacred as to the duty of women to stay at home and manage their households, 1 This is a reply to the article entitled "On the Side of the Maids," reprinted in EVERY SATURDAY, No. 118. and avoid politics, and take care that their husbands are pleased in all things. We know to what lengths these theorists are now going in trying to turn women into what women can never be. Did not I read, the other day, in the columns of a respectable newspaper, an announcement that in a "College Chapel" in the East End of London a certain "Reverend" would commence his ministry by preaching in the morning of a certain Sunday, and that in the evening his wife would preach? What a bouleversement of all one's old ideas of propriety and good sense! Conceive such an arrangement at Oxford or Cambridge the head of the College preaching to the undergraduates in the morning and his wife in the evening! I read once in a book "by an ex-Quaker" a story about some person who remonstrated with a Quakeress on the permission given to Quakeresses to preach, on the ground that St. Paul had forbidden preaching to women. "Ah," replied she, "but thee knows Paul was not partial to females!" But, leaving the Quakers alone, I will maintain that none but a mistress can know the sufferings of a mistress, or can realize what it is that women are now suffering at the hands of those who are technically called our servants. Men should not write about them, because they do not understand them, just as they should not write about babies. So I say about politics; they are a fit subject for men to have votes upon, because it is a subject which they understand. Of course I do not say that all men understand them. If they did, would they not all vote on the same side? But what I say is this, that men's interests lie in general matters, in public matters that is, in things taken on a large scale. For instance, they can understand how we ought to legislate about butchers and bakers and fishmongers; that is, about the rearing of bullocks, and the corn laws, and the protecting of rivers and fish. How thankful I am to that Mr. Frank Buckland for bringing down the price of salmon to what it is this year! But could they settle their actual butchers' and bakers' bills as women can? Could Mr. Frank Buckland himself buy a few pounds of salmon as economically as the mistress of a family? So, too, men can do pretty well about the police, and wars, and treaties, and affairs on a grand scale; it is only the King of Dahomey who makes women into soldiers; and I wonder that some of those gentlemen who wish to make us women think ourselves miserable when we don't feel so, have not proposed that Queen Victoria should have a body-guard of pretty girl-soldiers. But could any man keep a nursery in proper discipline? To those who will have it there is no ineradicable difference between men and women I put this plain question, Could men manage babies? And as they cannot manage nurseries, so they cannot manage households. Is there, as a rule, anything more deplorable than a bachelor's management of his women servants, when he pretends to keep a house of his own? Then I say that none but a woman can understand the case between maids and mistresses, or is to be accepted as an exponent of the sufferings of the mistresses of this year 1874. Men judge from what they call the à priori point of view, which appears to me to be very much like making their theories first, and then inventing a number of facts to suit those theories. This is particularly the case with the writer who has made this late onslaught upon the unfortunate mistresses of the period. He fancies that because the relations of masters and servants are no longer patriarchal, therefore mistresses have lost all fellow-feeling for their maids. Now what is all this that we occasionally hear about the patriarchal state of things in England long ago? When was there any relation between the master and the servant which did not make the servant perfectly well aware that he was the servant, and not his master's equal, and that a practically different life must be his lot as compared with his master's? There never was such a time of domestic bliss and equality, just as there never was a time when shepherds and shepherdesses wore the pretty little pink and blue and gilt clothes which they wear in Dresden China. I never could get at any proof of the actual existence of this happy state from any of our ad vanced young aristocratic democrats, or from the Tories who believe in the golden age, who come to my or whom I meet elsewhere. They say that women a judge by their emotions, and that they dislike mathe because it is impossible to extract any sentiment Euclid. But I find that men are just as unwilling brought to book about their favorite theories conce the past and the future. Here, for instance, when I ask for facts from past to prove that our maids are an ill-used race, and ought to let my cook have a piano-forte in the kitche when I examine the historical incidents, or the pl the poems, of the real past, I find nothing but illust of the greater familiarity that existed between m and maid, and between master and man; but that was any more truly human feeling between the two hear of no proofs whatsoever. They associated freely, especially at meals, just as the negro sla America associated more freely with their maste mistresses. But there was at the same time a ha ment of serfdom in all the domestic relations of our tors, which was rarely unfelt. They were familiar, also, because they were all less uneducated, up to a recent period. There is more or less outward equality when mistress and m not separated by that culture which, to a certain affects the tastes and feelings of everybody who ca tend to be what we mean by a lady. All this was enough, and so far as it is now changed, the change more be laid to the charge of the mistress as a fau rich folks can be blamed for having their kitchens ground in town houses, where land is dear, while t above-ground in the country, where land is cheap. same necessary position of the offices is, in truth, on sins which are brought against the unlucky mistres how is it to be helped? If you live in a town, wh houses are built in rows, there is no possibility of servants the same airy offices and bedrooms which sible when the house stands on its good-sized plot of Does our advocate of the down-trodden maids supp in patriarchal days town servants were better-log they are to-day? They always lived below the the soil, and slept in cramped little rooms imm under the roof. I am not saying that offices might healthier than they are now, and that there is no r improvement in the ventilation of the bedrooms, n of the maids, but of the mistresses also. But to ru with the notion that it is only now that these unco smart young women, who condescend to take our are the victims of an inhuman tyranny in respect rooms they inhabit, and where they store their Sunday costumes, is to sacrifice facts to sensational It must be remembered, too, what are the hom which these miserable maids first come; what rooms in which they have been used to live eve they were born. Has our censor the smallest kn of the bedrooms of the laborers' cottages; or of the and bed rooms in cities in which our unfortunate s have passed their days before they entered upon grading servitude? If he has, he must know the manufacturing sentimental sorrows of which the ob his compassion have no knowledge themselves. W contrast the condition of our maids with some idea in which every detail of life shall be regulated by tates of an elevated humanity, we must not forget tails of that domestic life from which our servants & or that in every possible respect, except that of f (which they are paid to give up), their personal c are greater than they have been accustomed to fro childhood. If the misery of their habitation was am here told that it is, why is it that maids never as to the rooms they are to sleep in, or as to the co the offices, when they inquire as to the conditions situation for which they offer themselves? Among t less reasons, true or false, which they assign for notice to leave," how is it that the kitchen and the room are never the cause that is mentioned, if the _C really as sensitive on these points as their advocate would bave us think? In reality, our modern sensitiveness in these matters of health and comfort has not yet descended to the level of the servant-maid. We might as reasonably pretend that the odors of a stable are as intolerab e to the nostrils of coachmen and their families, who live in a London mews, as they are to the nostrils of their masters. I remember a little urchin who lived in the East End of London, who was one day sent by his master with a parcel to a place beyond the Belgravian district, and on his way passed through Belgrave and other squares and streets around. "Well!" said his master, on his return, thinking that he would have been deeply impressed with the grandeur of that paradise of the wealthy, “what did you think of all those houses and squares?" "Shouldn't like to live there at no price," said the boy, contemptuously; "why, they're all like big, ugly City warehouses!" Just so with the women whom we are charged with lodging in a fashion most distressing to their highly sensitive souls. Our love for ventilation, for fair prospects, for all the dainty things for which our own immediate ancestors cared little or nothing, has not yet reached the hard-working and miserablylodged multitude from whom our servants are taken; and our dismal grandeur would be to them simply dreariness. "The fresh air and the expanse of her old surroundings are to the ordinary girl who leaves the country village for London service synonymous with dulness and the absence of all amusement, save horse-play and rough love-making. To the middle-aged and elderly country laborer and his wife, a transportation to London life would be as odious as to his daughters it is delightful. And if it is not delightful, how is it that one sister or cousin after another takes the recommendation of the first of a family who has tried London service, and follows her to this abode of barbarous servitude? For this is the gist of the charge which our censor brings against the mistress (whom he would always have us imagine to be a "lady") of this present day that we treat our maids with barbarity. "Take," he says, "the list of what is denied in an ordinary well-conducted house." (The italics are mine.) "No followers; no friends in the kitchen; no laughing to be heard up-stairs; no romping for young girls, to whom romping is an instinct all the same as with lambs and kittens; no cessation of work, save at mealtimes; no getting out for half an hour into the bright sunshine, save on the sly, or after the not always pleasant process of asking leave; and, above all, no education for the fancy or the intellect beyond a dull magazine for Sunday reading, which is held quite sufficient recreation for lonely Betty, moping in the dreary kitchen on the afternoon of her Sunday in." This is only one of the counts in the indictment against us, but it may serve as a specimen of that barbarity of feeling of which the mistresses of to day are guilty, as compared with the mistresses of the various patriarchal periods now gone by. Yet, if we want to know what is the degree of tenderness of fellow-feeling with which the affairs of domestic life were conducted in those blissful days, surely our only safe guide is to be found in what we know as to the public legislation concerning the poorer classes. Think then of the old political risings of the multitude, stimulated by the cruel feudal tyrannies. In every instance where we can learn the real causes of the old popular rebellions, it is plain that the social condition of the people was intolerable, and that the relation between rich and poor, which of course included that of mistresses and maids, was as far from any ideal friendliness and hearty good feeling as the most theoretical of young reformers can fancy he misses in the domestic relationships of to-day. Nothing is easier than to imagine the reality of this same patriarchal relationship, until we come to try its possibility in practice or by past history. But we want something more than fancy sketches; and the unhappy truth remains, that feudalism involved the pracice of domestic tyranny; and that even till a few years ago, he criminal law of England, directed especially against he offences committed by the lower grades of society, was orrible and blood-thirsty to the last degree. And nothing will ever persuade me that when men and women were hanged and tormented for those offences to which the poor are specially tempted, the legislation of private households was conducted on any more merciful principles. It is only, in truth, within the last one or two generations that we have learnt this doctrine of the common humanity of masters and servants, and of the comfortable and the suffering classes, and have begun to consider what we are to another. Now, indeed, all over England there is scarcely a town, or a village, or a parish, where this new care for the poor and sick, and this regard for the rights of those who labor with their hands, is not more or less altering the inner constitution of English society. That such an age should also be conspicuous for its harsh treatment of womenservants, old and young, is a notion which could never be mentioned by any one who is conversant with the facts of the case. Indeed it is difficult seriously to reason with a writer who thus concludes his list of the miseries of his hypothetical clients: "All grinding work and claustral monotony, with the world seen only through the gratings of the area window as the holiday folks flock to and fro this is English domestic service. And then we wonder that our maids, touched by the fever of this ardent, restless Present, revolt against it, and think their condition hard." There is an old story about Lord Kenyon, of judicial celebrity, which this picture of our household affairs brings at once to my recollection. He was a very gouty old gentleman, and one day a thief stole his gouty shoes. "Well!" he exclaimed, "the only harm I wish the rascal is that the shoes may fit him." So, too, the only harm I wish this advocate of the maids is that he should be transformed into one of the mistresses, and have the realities of a household cast upon his hands. He would speedily learn, if he would emerge from his bachelor chambers, and associate with the ladies whom he indiscriminately censures, that he has been making fancy sketches, which have not even the merit of caricatures. "No lady," he tells us, "feels herself degraded by the use of harsh language to her servants, just as no slave-holding lady feels herself degraded if she strikes her slave or orders her out to be flogged." This comes of living in chambers and being waited on by that singular form of womanhood described as a "laundress." Our critic should know that no lady does use harsh language to her servants, and that if in a moment of provocation (for maids are sometimes most grievously irritating) she speaks too harshly, she does feel some sense of shame. To compare the feelings of English ladies towards their maids with those of slave-holders towards their slaves is just one of those extravagances which only the ignorance of a volunteer reformer would have ventured on. Our censor has clearly gone to some inferior lodginghouse keeper, and has asked her for her notions of the way that servants ought to be treated and how they are treated "in an ordinary well-conducted house," and then he has worked up that valuable and trustworthy information into a sensational paper. How otherwise could he have come to the conclusion that in gentlemen's houses of the professional and aristocratic classes, where the mistress may be assumed to be a "lady," those terrible sufferings are endured? 66 No followers are allowed!" this is the firstnamed of their lamentable woes. For my part, I hardly ever heard of a house where "followers" were not allowed, unless where the mistress was one of those exceptionable beings who are rigorous to everybody except themselves. Would our Utopian himself like to preside over a household where the maids were permitted an unlimited number of visitors of the male sex? Few ladies that I ever knew have strictly forbidden the visits of "followers" who were engaged to be married at some future time to their maids. And nothing more is possible. Our Utopian does not seem to be aware that it is the custom with English maids to be on friendly terms with two classes of young men, the "walker" and the "follower." The "walker" is simply a recognized companion out-of-doors, and his vocation is considered perfectly respectable. The recognition of a man as a "follower," on the other hand, implies definite matrimonial intentions. The penny post has now created a |