thus complaining he is trespassing upon a peculiar of Mr. A. Lang's. 24th. Stayed in town to attend the presentation of the statuette of Sir Thomas More to the Chelsea Library. It is curious that London should be content with such a meagre memorial of one of her greatest sons. Went afterwards to a meeting of a little society to encourage the employment of men who have served their time with the colors. Could not a similar society be started to find occupation for retired officers? Surely we. are as a class the most pitiable people in the world. A day arrives when we lose our chief interest in life. The routine work of duty, the slave that bore the burden and heat with a light heart and easy conscience falls dead; and we must look about for a successor. Sometimes the by-work is set to the mill, and loses much of its zest in consequence. L. turns his lathe now all the morning, instead of at odd moments, and his house is fast filling with useless little pots; H. scours the country collecting grandfather's elocks for the sake of the brass corners on their faces; M. has taken up with the Church Association, and pesthe bishops with resolutions against Rome. They are fairly happy; but how many I know at Eastbourne and Southsea and other wateringplaces, who are sorely conscious, except for a month or two in autumn, of the passage of time-"time's discrete flow," as the psychologists call it-the odious now, now, now. "A man's life's let; but that was his hopelessly unno more than to say one," said Hampractical turn of mind, or possibly his fulness of matter. To many it is to say one, one, one, as the clock ticks. 27th.-Went to the sale at Manor. Fuller long ago remarked that Berkshire land was skittish and apt to throw its rider; but since the great fall in prices it has been changing hands very rapidly. The old yeomen of whom the county has long made its boast-Mavor attributing to Mr. Pitt the saying "that no minister could command ten votes in Berkshire"-are finding it impossible to go on farming at a loss, and are selling their land to nouveaux riches from town. The old manor-houses are pulled down and mansions take their place. It is a sad change for the yeomen and their friends, and perhaps for the country, but profitable for the peasantry, who will get better paid and housed. 28th.-What topsy-turvy sort of vanity is that which takes pleasure in being like distinguished people. I met a curate this afternoon at our member's garden-party who is the very twin of the Archbishop of Canterbury, only that he is of course "less consequential about the legs." He had the archiepiscopal carriage and look, even to the smile, which is a good smile, though not quite so good as the pope's; -that seems to have more centuries behind it. I know, too, several middleaged gentlemen who are not unlike the newspaper pictures of the Prince of Wåles. But how can the resemblance in any reasonable way feed vanity, as it certainly does? There is more interest in being like the mighty dead, because one may cherish a mild Pythagoreanism. For example, my own nickname at school was Socrates, and I have recently discovered that I might have sat for the portrait of Ravaillac. Sophia often asks me why I keep a portrait of the poet Gray on my mantelpiece; the reason is that it is so very like her, especially about the chin; but I do not like to say so, as she might not be flattered. 30th.-Read the August Cornhill. It is always a puzzle to me how people can enjoy fiction in monthly doses. "Jack," whose theological speculations are here chronicled, must be "elderly," like the baby in the "Bab Ballads," for some of his heresies were told us before I began to shave. But there are others which no less deserve record. For instance, he came in one was day in a great hurry to ask God's Christian name, and was told He had none. "It's of no consequence," the reply, "I have put Alfred;" Alfred being the name of his grandfather, the archdeacon. On another occasion, when the floor was up in the diningroom to mend a gas-pipe, he came to his mother with tears in his eyes, and said, "O mother, I know I'm lost; but I cannot help pitying that poor dear Devil; and so I've been and poured some water down the hole in the din ing-room floor." Jack has a Scotch cousin Donald, who is of a more metaphysical turn of mind, as becomes a Shorter Catechumen. The following little dialogue will show that he inherits the faith of his fathers: Donald: Mother, was Jesus Christ a Jew? Mother: Yes, Donald. Donald: But how could He be, when God the Father is a Presbyterian? From The Spectator. ON BEING A WOMAN. "It's a horrid scrape to be a woman," said Mr. Walter Bagehot, with an insight rare indeed in the masculine observer. To most men the matter is far simpler. Women, as Mrs. Gamp said of "Rooshians" and Prooshians," "was born so, and can please themselves." The essential difference in the outlook on life which comes from the "myself" having been born in the body of a woman, is a thing as to which the average Englishman troubles himself very little. Yet in truth the difference is almost as great as is in America the difference of having been born with a black skin or a white. It is a difference not in degree, but in kind. When in the first moment of returning consciousness the new-made mother asks the sex of her infant, the answer comes to her as the voice of destiny,-the prophecy of the fate of the new-born child. Is it to lead the life of a man-to continue its father's name or is it to leave name and race, and in its turn fulfil the great duty of woman-motherhood? For here, of course, is the crux of the matter. Woman is the mother of the human race, and the carrying on of the race is so important a function as to more than justify the devotion of the half of mankind to this end alone. So woman in her capacity of mother is worked for, watched over, and tended by man,-for what were the use of all his toil were he to leave no child to inherit its fruit? This, then, is the rough division of the work of the world -the man earning the money, the woman continuing the race and the woman who from necessity or choice steps outside this arrangement, is apt to resent the fact that life is arranged for the average, not the exceptional human being. For the average lot, so dreaded by the young as a thing to be avoided at all costs, is really the happiest in the end, and Nerissa spoke a great truth when she told her mistress that "It is no mean happiness therefore to be seated in the mean." It is this essential difference in the lot of the two sexes which makes it so difficult for men to realize what it feels like to be a woman. In the first place, the life of a woman is passed in settling an everlasting succession of details. From the earliest moment in the morning, till she goes to bed at night, constant demands are made upon her atten tion and resource to give small decisions or settle minute emergencies. Probably the entire wardrobe of three or four human beings is arranged by herall the garments which they all want in different degrees of thickness for the varying seasons. The renewal of all the brooms, brushes, "leathers," and innumerable etc., needful for the cleaning of the house, falls to her. The commissariat of the family, a matter only to be arranged by close attention to details, the health of the children, wh is to go for a bicycle ride with the governess, and who looks pale and tired and had better stay and play in the garden, these are matters which require constant supervision. Then there is the health of the household,-a terrible undertaking, the "Please, ma'am, have you got anything as'll do Jane good, she's that bad with toothache?" and the subsequent persuading of Jane to seek the purgatorial refuge of the dentist's. The narrowness of a great number of women comes from this perpetual contemplation of minutiæ. Their eyes are out of focus for the larger events of life. And this probably is the reason why women attain so little eminence in the abstract sciences. Their minds are trained to dwell on details; hence a woman's argument is apt to turn aside to some minute side-point of the matter in hand instead of keeping to the main issue. But what, perhaps, men realize least in woman's lot is that in the larger affairs of life woman has absolutely no power at all. This will be said to be nonsense, and instances innumerable can be quoted in which great events have been settled by women. True, but only by the influence of women over men. Now to have power yourself is a vely different thing from having influence over a person who has power. And all the great things which have been done through the instrumentality of women have been done merely by the power which the woman has of influencing the man who holds the direct power in his hands. A different complexion is put on the affairs of life when a woman first realizes this limitation of her possibilities. She cannot move the world, and so her attitude becomes that of a watcher, a criticiser of the actions of others, forever looking on, forever weighing the doings of the real workers. Her very ambition prompts her to efface herself. She can do her best work in the world by turning her own talents to account to smooth the path of a man whom she can sway, and who has all the possibilities before him. So the woman does her utmost to use her brain in his interest, to attend to all tiresome details so as to leave him as free as possible from petty cares and worries. Then the man can concentrate the whole of his energy in his work, and the woman's ambition is vicariously satisfied. She watches the friend, brother, and husband, and feels with a half-amused complacency that that it means to have ambition best but for her his end would never have been attained. And this eternal watching and criticism develops in woman a great power of knowing what men will do in particular circumstances. She has seen so often before that particular circumstances have particular effects in determining the actions of the workers. In the stress and hurry of the fight the man is not conscious which way the action is tending. He is absorbed in doing the duty immediately before him. The woman looking on coolly can say to him, "See, this line of conduct must lead to this and this consequence; you have only to take advantage of it, and your success will be assured." It is therefore because woman is essentially a looker-on that she is so invaluable as an adviser to man. To many a great man the advice of an Egeria, even an Egeria of an obviously inferior intellectual calibre to himself, is almost essential. She can watch and weigh the motives of his adversaries, she can calculate the probable effect of his own actions. and still more of his words, she can criticise his past decisions and indicate the best chance of success in the future. In fact, to be a woman is to be a mahout,a driver of elephants. The goad with which she steers the animal is in her hand, but yet she knows, as according to Mr. Rudyard Kipling every mahout knows, that some day sooner or later the great beast will get beyond her control, and may turn on her with a terrible punishment for the insult of having kept him in subjection. For the ultimate force in life, physical strength, is against the woman as it is against the mahout. But it must be insisted on that it is not merely by pulling the strings and working the puppets that woman wields her influence. It is also by taking on herself the distracting drudgery. So that whoever would know what it feels like to be a woman must realize forwarded by self-effacement, talents which must be applied to looking on at the game, powers of organization used to arrange merely the minutiæ of civilized existence, and finally to have the possibility of boundless influence, without a jot of direct power behind it. It is against this lot that a certain number of the women of the day cry out in rebellion. And as the destiny of woman is decided not by the wickedness of man, but simply by the facts of nature, their complaint is about as useful and as dignified as would be the constant outcry of a man born blind that it was a cruel fate which prevented him from becoming a painter. "All this talk of our destinies is one half of it ignorance and the other half rum,” says the "Biglow Papers," and if we substitute "strong tea" for rum this may be not too unfairly applied to the woman who declares that she must abandon all her natural duties in order that she may "develop her individuality." The more old-fashioned among us may remember how the Catechism told us "to do our duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call us," and as the "state of life" of being a woman is quite unalterable, women may be content to make the best of its limitations. And after all these limitations have their compensations. How many women are not thankful to be spared the rough-andtumble of the real fight of the world? If they can only satisfy their ambition vicariously, they can at least satisfy it in a leisurely manner, without soiling their fingers with the oil wherewith the machinery of the world is lubricated. The kindly cynicism, too, with which they regard men, their masters, is not without its attraction. Perhaps it is not the highest fate to be born a woman, but at any rate we may rest assured that to be a man is not to see life entirely couleur de rose. FOR SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for- warded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made |