CHAPTER I.

MATRONS AND MAIDS.

Artificiality of eighteenth-century life--The _rôle_ of the middle-class woman--Scotch domestic life--The old maid--Admiration of foreigners for English women--English dress--Public morals--Contrast between town and country life--A country lady in London--Racquets, routs, and drums--Education of girls--The boarding-school--Habits and manners of the middle class--Le Blanc’s opinion of the English.

“La dix-huitième siècle aime la nature.” The love of the eighteenth century for nature was, however, a capricious attachment, a spurious sentiment. No century so delighted in artificiality. Its dress, its habits, its amusements, its very speech,--all bear witness to its dislike of nature unadorned. It loved the town and the works of man. The eighteenth century stands out with a curiously distinct individuality. The influences that moulded society in the time of the Stuarts had passed away. The contest between the moralist and the sensualist had spent itself. Although the Puritan spirit lived on, it slumbered awhile, and the open profligacy against which it had striven, though not extinguished, was manifested in less pronounced shapes. The Church was both lethargic and corrupt. For the first time in English history we come upon a period when there was no dominant spiritual influence. Religion, like everything else, was a matter of formalism.

Slowly the great characteristics of social life in England had changed. Romanism and feudalism had governed it in earlier times. Then came the Renaissance, with its vivifying power, followed by the reign of sensuality and the opposing force of Puritanism. It seemed as if the nation were exhausted; passion had spent itself, moral feeling was deadened, enthusiasm was quenched. The new force was conventionality.

Women in every-day life felt the spell of this goddess less than did the great ladies. Over the fashionable world she reigned supreme; but the _bourgeoisie_, while they admired, and as far as possible imitated, the ways of their social superiors, showed themselves more children of nature.

Increase of material ease and comfort was re-shaping the course of domestic life. As household arrangements were improved, new appliances invented, and the general conditions made smoother, woman’s position changed. She was less completely occupied with the means of living, and more open to outside influences. That she invariably made a good use of her liberty is not so clear. The prosperous, well-housed citizenesses of the eighteenth century probably spent much of their spare time in idle chatter--it was a great period for gossip--and in tricking themselves out to imitate the fine ladies of whom they got glimpses at church and in the public gardens. They rose late because it was fashionable, leaving their servants to do the work that their grandmothers would have shared. There is as much lost as gained in the uprooting of social habits while the people are still unripe for changes. And the women of the eighteenth century _were_ unripe. There was more material than intellectual improvement. The literary movement hardly touched women in every-day life; the philanthropic movement had not made any headway, and as for politics, it was only the great ladies, with relatives and friends among statesmen, who concerned themselves with public affairs. Middle-class women seldom read the newspapers. It was in the coffee-houses that men learned and discussed the news of the day; they did not buy the papers and bring them home in London. In the country a weekly news-letter was handed from neighbour to neighbour, or discussed at village inns, but the women-folk usually gathered their news by hearsay, not finding much to interest them in the curiously composed, ill-printed medley that called itself a newspaper.

The women of the middle classes did not keep pace with the men in enlarging their sphere of interests. Among the aristocracy women were naturally drawn more into the current of life by their connection with leading men of the time, by their intercourse with distinguished foreign visitors, by their opportunities of travel and of contact with the best thought of the day. But the women of the trading classes were removed from all these influences. Their _rôle_ was a domestic one. The education which they received was not calculated to inspire them with any idea that their minds needed enlarging. It was seldom thought that women required anything beyond a few accomplishments.

In Scotland--

“domestick affairs and amuseing her husband was the bussiness of a good wife. Those that could afoard governesses for their children had them, but all they could learn them was to read English ill and plain work. The chief thing required was to hear them repeat Psalms and long catechisms, in which they were employed an hour or more every day, and almost the whole day on Sunday. If there was no governess to perform this work it was done by the chaplan, of which there was one in every family. No attention was given to what we call accomplishments. Reading and writing well, or even spelling, was never thought of. Musicke, drawing, or French were seldom taught the girls. They were allowed to rune about and amuse themselves in the way they choiced, even to the age of women, at which time they were generally sent to Edinburgh for a winter or two to lairn to dress themselves, and to dance and see a little of the world. The world was only to be seen at Church, at marriages, burials, and baptisms. These were the only public places where the ladys went in full dress, and as they walked the street they were seen by everybody; but it was the fashion when in undress all-wise to be masked. When in the country their employment was in color’d work, beds, tapestry and other pieces of furniture; imitations of fruits and flowers with very little taste. If they read any it was either books of devotion or long romances, and sometimes both.”

These are the words of an Ayrshire lady, whose reminiscences date back to the early years of the eighteenth century. She lived up till 1795, during which time she witnessed a great change in girls’ education. Reading, writing, music, drawing, geography, history, even French and Italian were added gradually to the curriculum.

In former periods women were producers as well as distributors, each household being like a little township, dependent on itself. But in the eighteenth century, although domestic industries had not been revolutionized as they have since been, there were factories and shops, and all sorts of hawkers, who vended goods of various kinds in the streets. In London and in the large towns there was no need for each family to produce its own necessaries, though in country districts the domestic arrangements were more stationary. Baking, brewing, and salting were still carried on in the larger houses occupied by the gentry, but in small households most of the things required for daily use were bought. The domestic _rôle_ of the eighteenth-century woman among the middle classes was not so absorbing as to leave her no time for mental recreation. But books, like politics, were, for the most part, left to the men. There was so little circulation of literature that in London much of the reading was done standing at a bookseller’s stall, a method obviously impossible to women. With such scanty education as was considered appropriate to the weaker sex, with no books but of the most dreary kind, written for young people, it was little wonder that the generality of girls grew up without any habit of reading, or of regarding literature as an essential element of their daily lives. We cannot think of the average woman in the last century as finding much of her pleasure in any intellectual occupation. She had been neglected, her mind allowed to rust. The awakening that had taken place two hundred years before had been succeeded by a reaction, and there was a general apathy with regard to women’s education.

A writer in the second quarter of the century, who is vaunting the superiority of men over women, says England is

“the place in the world where the fair sex is the most regarded, and, perhaps, deserves most to be so.... Nor is it easy to comprehend how it is possible to raise them higher with any show of reason, considering their natural incapacity for everything above the sphere they actually move in.”

Foreigners were always struck by the freedom enjoyed by married women. One observes that

“among the common people the husbands seldom make their wives work. As to the women of quality, they don’t trouble themselves about it.”

The middle-class wife has been pictured for us by Fielding in the description of Squire Western’s wife:--

“The Squire, to whom that poor woman had been a faithful upper-servant all the time of their marriage, had returned that behaviour by making what the world calls a good husband. He very seldom swore at her, perhaps not above once a week, and never beat her. She had not the least occasion for jealousy, and was perfect mistress of her time, for she was never interrupted by her husband, who was engaged all the morning in his field exercises and all the evening with bottle companions.”

Whatever the position of the wife, it was preferred to that of the single woman.

“An old maid is now thought such a curse as no Poetick Fury can exceed,” writes the author of “The Ladies’ Calling,” “looked on as the most calamitous creature in nature. And I so far yield to the opinion as to confess it to those who are kept in that state against their wills; but sure, the original of that misery is from the desire, not the restraint, of marriage: let them but suppress that once, and the other will never be their infelicity. But I must not be so unkind to the sex as to think ’tis always such desire that gives them an aversion to celibacy; I doubt not many are frighted only with the vulgar contempt under which that state lyes: for which if there be no cure, yet there is the same armour against this which is against all other causeless reproaches, viz. to contemn it.”

This supports the remark that women were more easily won than formerly. An elderly beau writes--

“The men of these days are strangely happy. In my time a fine woman was not to be gain’d without a long application and a thousand testimonies of an unfeign’d and constant regard; but now a game of romps or a lucky run at cards reduces the vanquished fair to accept of what condition the conqueror is pleased to give.”

The modest demeanour of English women when seen abroad excited the admiration of foreigners, who were a little astonished at the general taste for walking, which is

“a great diversion among the ladies and their manner of doing it is one way of knowing their character; desiring only to be seen, they would walk together for the most part without speaking, they are always dressed and always stiff; they go forward constantly, and nothing can amuse them or put them out of their way.... Yet, notwithstanding all their care to be seen, they are seldom coquets, nor have they any ridiculous affectations or bold ways.”

It was not usual for girls to walk about alone, and was considered indecorous by the older generation.

“I know this age has so great a contempt of the former that ’tis but matter of scorn to alledge any of their customs; else I should say that the liberties that are taken now would then have been startled at. They that should then have seen a young maid rambling abroad without her mother or some other prudent person, would have looked on her as a stray, and thought it but a neighbourly office to have brought her home: whereas now ’tis a rarity to see them in any company graver than themselves, and she that goes with her parent (unless it be such a parent as is as wild as herself) thinks she does but walk abroad with jaylour.”

Our national fault--want of taste in dress, and fondness for new fashions, however unsuitable--called forth the censure of an Italian visitor:--

“The ladies of England do not understand the art of decorating their persons so well as those of Italy; they generally increase the volume of the head by a cap which makes it much bigger than nature, a fault which should be always avoided in adorning that part.... They wear their petticoats too short behind, and not imitating the most graceful birds, as the ladies of Italy and France, in a trail of their robes upon the ground, lose the greatest grace which dress can impart to a female....

“In truth, not beauty, but novelty governs in London, not taste, but copy. A celebrated woman of five foot six inches gives law to the dress of those who are but four feet two.... There is nothing so common as to hear the ladies of this nation assure you that such a shape is quite out of fashion, and the present reigning mode is the slender or the large; as if the creative power, like the hands of mantua makers, had cut the human person by a new pattern and thrown away the old.... This is not the case in Italy and France; the ladies know that the grace which attends plumpness is unbecoming the slender; and the tall lady never affects to look like a fairy; nor the dwarf like the giantess, but each studying the air and mein which become her figure, appears in the most engaging dress that can be made, to set off her person to the greatest advantage.”

About the middle of the century quite an outcry arose about the introduction of so many French fashions, and the prints of the day are full of caricatures of French ways and costumes. It was the upper classes who were first seized with this mania for imitation, and the example being infectious, spread rapidly through all ranks of society. The fashionable world followed France, and the middle classes followed the fashionable world. The mode of life, the popularity of public gardens, to which high and low resorted, brought the ways of the gay world under the eyes of the staid folk who dwelt in the city.

“What was looked upon as the beau-monde, then lived much more in public than now, and men and women of fashion displayed their weaknesses to the world in public places of amusement and resort with little shame or delicacy. The women often rivalled the men in libertinism and even emulated them sometimes in their riotous manners.”[64]

In 1770 an Act was passed declaring--

“That all women of whatever age, rank, profession, or degree, whether virgins, maids or widows, that shall from and after such Act, impose upon, seduce, or betray into matrimony, any of his Majesty’s male subjects by the scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes, etc., shall incur the penalty of the law now in force against witchcraft and like misdemeanours, and that the marriage upon conviction shall stand null and void.”

Public morals were at a low ebb if we may trust the observation of that experienced traveller, M. Grosley, who says that the women of the town were bolder and more numerous in London than in Paris or Rome. They thronged the footpaths at night, and even in broad daylight accosted passers by, more particularly those whom they perceived to be foreigners.

Archenholz, who visited London some years after Grosley, says:--

“On compte cinquante mille prostituées à Londres, sans les maîtresses en titre. Leurs usages et leur conduite déterminent les différentes classes où il faut les ranger. La plus vile de toutes habite dans les lieux publics sous la direction d’une matrone qui les loge et les habille. Ces habits même pour les filles communs, sont de soie, suivant l’usage que le luxe a généralement introduit en Angleterre.... Dans la seule paroisse de Marybonne, qui est la plus grande et la plus peuplée de l’Angleterre, on en comptoit, il y a quelques années, treize mille, dont dix-sept cents occupoient des maisons entières à elles seules.”

One of the causes of the number of these _filles de joie_ was, probably, the constant immigration from the provinces of young friendless girls eager to taste the delights of London. When their means were exhausted it was impossible for them to return or obtain employment without credentials, and they entered upon the only career that seemed open to them.

Another Frenchman comments on the openly lax morality which disgraced English family life--

“There’s yet a much greater fault which the English women have reason to complain of, and that is that most of the husbands keep mistresses. Some have carried them home and made them eat at the same table with their wives, and yet no mischief happened.... They have been seen even in company with the wives, and if there is any distinction, ’tis that they are handsomer for the most part, better dressed and less starch’d.”[65]

“If this be thought an exaggerated portrait, drawn with the inaccuracy of hasty observation and coloured by prejudice, the same cannot be said with regard to the pen of Fielding, who, in “Tom Jones,” reflects popular opinion and represents the standard of the day. A young fellow, named Nightingale, who has betrayed his landlady’s daughter, is thus addressed by his uncle:--

“Honour is a creature of the world’s making, and the world has the power of a creator over it, and may govern and direct it as they please. Now, you well know how trivial these breaches of contract are thought: even the grossest make but the wonder and conversation of the day. Is there a man who afterwards will be more backward in giving you his sister or daughter, or is there any sister or daughter who would be more backward to receive you? Honour is not concerned in these engagements.”

It will be remembered how “Squire Western,” when he heard that “Tom Jones” had betrayed a village girl, laughed at the episode as a good joke, and called upon his daughter to bear him out that women would think no worse of a young fellow for that. As for “Sophia” herself, it proved no serious check on her passion.

And yet England was said to be the country where offences against women were punished with the greatest severity, and where, if a man wished to find an unlawful partner, he must search among those whose poverty made them ready victims to temptation.

It cannot be doubted that women of the middle classes were accustomed to expect a lower standard of morality among men than at the present day. The novels of the last century show that what are now deemed as grave offences were then considered mere peccadilloes. Drinking and swearing were foibles too common to excite notice, and breaches of the moral code were easily condoned. The women were not so prone themselves as might have been thought to the sins which they tolerated, but they were brought up in the belief that a larger licence should be allowed to men. The same tendency is apparent now in circles where the women take little or no share in the occupations of their husbands and brothers, and where the interests are totally different. The women, who are the most ready to be lenient where they should be severe, set up different standards of morality for the sexes, and draw a dividing-line between masculine and feminine virtues and vices.

What greatly impressed Frenchmen was the seriousness of English wives, and their sober, chaste lives.

“Au milieu des débordemens, souvent poussés à l’excès, dans cette grande ville, il est bien rare de voir la corruption attaquer une femme mariée, et chercher à lui faire partager ses infames plaisirs. Elle trouve un rempart insurmontable dans son amour pour sa famille, les soins de son ménage, et sa gravité naturelle. Je soutiens même qu’il n’y a pas de ville dans le monde où l’honneur des maris soit moins en danger qu’à Londres.”

Another writes:--

“Le part qu’ont les femmes au sérieux et à la mélancolie nationale en les rendant sédentaire, les attache à leurs maris, à leurs enfans, et à leur ménage.”

Le Blanc remarks, with a touch of wounded vanity--

“Most of those who among us pass for men of good fortune in amours, would with difficulty succeed in addressing an English fair. She would not sooner be subdued by the insinuating softness of their jargon than by the amber with which they are perfumed.”

Naturally a Frenchman thought his own countrywomen more attractive--

“The women in France are not so reserved as in England; but we find charms in their company which those of this country have not. The one, by their awkwardness, have the defect of making virtue itself disagreeable; the others, more engaging, have often the pernicious art of making vice seem amiable.”

There were those who complained that in France--

“women have too much boldness, and are scarcely women. The continual commerce between the sexes causes, as it were, an exchange of characters which makes each sex derogate something from its proper character. They (the women) drink hard at table, and do it agreeably. They understand gaming as well as men. They go a-hunting with men, and come so near to men in everything that they are scarcely women.”

What would have been thought of the modern Englishwoman who rides to hounds, wears masculine, tailor-made clothes, and shares the serious occupations as well as the amusements of the male sex, it is needless to discuss. In the last century pursuits that are now quite common, and pass without notice, were thought extravagantly fast, while our ancestors tolerated a licence of manners and speech that we, in our turn, should repudiate.

There was considerable difference between the manners and habits of town dwellers and those living in the country. An article in _The Female Spectator_, in 1745, recounts a country lady’s experiences on her first visit to London, and her amazement at the habits of London folk. She went to call on an old acquaintance with whom she had at one time been extremely intimate:--

“It was between eleven and twelve when I came to her door, where, after knocking a considerable time, a footman with his nightcap on, and pale as just risen from the dead, came yawning forth, and on my asking for his lady, ‘O Gad, madam,’ drawled he out, ‘we had a racquet here last night, and my lady cannot possibly be stirring these three hours.’ I wondered what had happened, but would not ask any questions of the fellow, and only left my name and said I would wait on her at a more proper time.”

The lady returns about three o’clock, after shopping and dining, and thus describes her visit:--

“I had now the good fortune to be admitted, and found her at her chocolate; she had a dish of it in one hand, and with the other she seemed very busy in sorting a large parcel of guineas, which she divided in two heaps on a table that stood before her. She rose and received me with a great deal of civility and kindness, told me she was sorry for my disappointment on my first calling, but added with a smile that when I had been a little while in town I should learn to lie longer in bed in a morning.”

After this the London lady explains to her country visitor the meaning of the term racquet, viz. when the number of company assembled for cards exceeded ten tables; if it were fewer, the entertainment was called a “rout,” and if there were only two tables it was a “drum.”

To the bewildered visitor the amusements of London folk seemed very odd, and she adds that she found cheating at cards almost as fashionable as cards themselves.

As the stage-coach system developed country people came more to London, and Londoners began to pay periodical visits to watering-places, whither they carried the dissipations of town life. The love of scenery is a taste that has been largely developed within the present century. When people travelled formerly, if it were not for business, it was to comply with fashion and for the excitement of a change, but not to revel in the beauties of Nature. The eighteenth century was full of artificial sentiment. It disliked in women the evidences of health and of a robust constitution of mind. The effect on ordinary women was to make them shallow and affected. They were not taught to think; they were encouraged to believe that appearances counted for everything, reality for nothing. As long as the exterior was pleasing, it mattered not what was beneath.

“When a poor young lady is taught to value herself on nothing but her cloaths and to think she’s very fine when well accoutred; when she hears say, that ’tis wisdom enough for her to know how to dress herself, that she may become amiable in his eyes, to whom it appertains to be knowing and learned; who can blame her if she lay out her industry and money on such accomplishments, and sometimes extends it farther than her misinformer desires she should....

“If from our infancy we are nurs’d upon ignorance and vanity; are taught to be proud and petulent, delicate and fantastick, humorous and inconstant, ’tis not strange that the ill-effects of this conduct appears in all the future actions of our lives.... That, therefore, women are unprofitable to most, and a plague and dishonour to some men is not much to be regretted on account of the men, because ’tis the product of their own folly, in denying them the benefits of an ingenuous and liberal education, the most effectual means to direct them into, and secure their progress in the ways of vertue.”[66]

The flirtation with literature, the coquetting with accomplishments which passed for female education, were shams, like the powdered _pouffs_ of hair and the face-washes. It was an age of shams, and women were told, in effect if not in words, that successful shamming was their _rôle_ in life. They were to sham sensitiveness, modesty, ignorance (which could not have been difficult), anything and everything which it was deemed likely would commend them to the perverted taste of the day. The vapourish, hysterical, fainting heroines of romance are only slightly coloured pictures of reality.

The physical effects of the system of education were as harmful as the results on the mind.

“Miss is set down to her frame before she can put on her clothes; and is taught to believe that to excel at the needle is the only thing that can entitle her to general esteem.... One hardly meets with a girl who can at the same time boast of early performances by the needle and a good constitution.”[67]

_The Female Spectator_ issued a protest against that devotion to the needle, which was regarded as one of the cardinal virtues in women:--

“Nor can I by any means approve of compelling young ladies of fortune to make so much use of the needle, as they did in former days, and some few continue to do. In my opinion a lady of condition should learn just as much of cookery and of work as to know when she is imposed upon by those she employs in both those necessary occasions, but no more. To pass too much of her time in them may acquire her the reputation of a notable housewife, but not of a woman of fine taste, or any way qualify her for polite conversation, or of entertaining herself agreeably when alone. It always makes me smile when I hear the mother of fine daughters say, ‘I always keep my girls at their needle.’ One, perhaps, is working her a gown, another a quilt for a bed, and a third engaged to make a whole dozen of shirts for her father. And then when she has carried you into the nursery and shewn you them all, add, ‘It is good to keep them out of idleness; when young people have nothing to do, they naturally wish to do something they ought not.’”

In the second half of the century, when the influence of the fashionable world was more strongly felt among the _bourgeoisie_, the boarding-school, with its flimsy accomplishments and its lack of solid education, began to attract the daughters of a different class. Hitherto it had been the monopoly of the so-called gentlefolk, but now mingling with these were the daughters of tradesmen and farmers, who had money to spend and a fancy for making “ladies” of their girls. It may have been a step up in the social ladder for these newcomers, but from an educational point of view it was no gain. The training of the fashionable boarding-school was only a veneer.

To the French it seemed odd and unnatural to see English parents sending their children off to boarding-schools, or to be educated abroad at the convent schools of Paris. In France young girls were kept at home with their mothers much more than in England.

“Les parens se débarassent de leurs enfans,” writes La Combe in his “Tableau de Londres,” “en les jettant au hazard dans des pensions ou des académies. Ils semblent rougir de voir leurs enfans se former sous leurs yeux; ils prefèrent des étrangers, qui n’ont ni attachement ni la connaissance des passions des enfans qu’on leur confie, et les elévent tous avec indifférence sur le même plan. Il serait plus raisonnable d’avoir les enfans chez soi, d’étudier leur goût, leur penchant, de les façonner peu à peu par la douceur et les caresses, à la docilité au travail, à l’honnêteté et de les familiariser insensiblement avec tout ce qu’ils doivent savoir un jour et pratiquer dans la société. On est étonné, à Paris surtout, lorsqu’on voit arriver de jeunes Anglaises dans les couvents. Quoi? dit on, les mœurs sont donc bien corrompues à Londres pour nous charger d’élever les demoiselles.”

As the century grew older the habits and amusements of the leisured classes spread to the trading community.

“I will not presume to say that all the misfortunes the city of London at present labours under are owing to their preposterous fondness of following the fashions of the court; but that they are in a great measure so I believe most people will readily enough agree to.”[68]

Speaking of a City dame who had taken up with the fashions of the West-end, the same writer observed--

“A great courtier now become, she looks with contempt on her former fellow-citizens, joins in the laugh coquets and beaus set up whenever any of them appear, and sees not that herself is equally an object of ridicule to those she is so vain of imitating. Thus despising and despised without one real friend, she lives a gawdy, glittering, worthless member of society, and endured by those whose example has rendered her such, on no other account than that immense wealth which they find means to share with her, while she imagines they are doing her an honour.”

The busy merchants and traders whose wives were so eager to be in the fashion were themselves no less anxious to be up to the times.

“I do not but see that the men are as eager to quit their compting houses and strut in the drawing-room disguised in a long sword and taper wig as the women can be in a new brocade, exactly the same pattern with that of one of the Princesses. The infection has spread itself pretty equally through both sexes. And the husband has little to reproach the wife with, or the wife the husband, but what each are guilty of in the same degree.”

Merchants and bankers, in spite of the cares of business, took life very easily, spending the first part of the morning in the coffee-houses, and, after a couple of hours at the Exchange, going home to dinner at four o’clock.

The manners and customs of the eighteenth century accentuated the differences of sex, and set up artificial barriers between men and women. Foreigners, because they heard politics constantly discussed, and forming the chief interest of the citizen’s life, and because they saw the wife acquiesce in her husband’s views, concluded that politics proved a strong bond of union in family life.

“Cet intérêt repand dans le domestique un nouvel agrément: le mari y trouvant toujours quelqu’un avec qui il peut traiter à cœur ouvert, aussi longuement et aussi profondement que bon lui semble, les objets qui l’interessent le plus.”

As has been noted elsewhere, interest in politics--especially politics which dealt in personalities--was keen enough among the women of the aristocracy, for the game was being largely played by their own friends, but the women of the middle classes were generally indifferent to public affairs. Except on occasions of great public excitement, the City madam, the country squire’s lady, and the farmer’s wife knew little of what was stirring in the world of statecraft. They lumped together politics and pipes as part of the men’s amusements with which they had no direct concern. They shared their husbands’ views because they had none of their own, and it was not worth while troubling their heads about such matters as changes of Ministry, Bills in Parliament, and so forth.

Occupations and habits caused men and women to lead separate lives. Hard riding and hard drinking were the recreations of the country squire; the farmer had his out-door duties; the tradesman had his apprentices to superintend; the shopkeeper had no suburban residence, and was a shopkeeper all day long while the shutters were open. The wife occupied herself with her store-cupboard, her linen-press, and her kitchen, and gossiped in her parlour with neighbours over a dish of tea.

“The English,” wrote Le Blanc, “lose a great deal in conversing so little with the sex whom Nature has endowed with the graces, and whose company has constant charms and a certain sweetness not to be found in that of men. The conversation of women polishes and softens our behaviour; by the habit we acquire of endeavouring to please them, we contract a tone of voice equally agreeable to both sexes....

“The custom of living with what is most valuable in both sexes, makes the pleasure and happiness of life.... And ’tis by too much neglecting this custom that the English have a certain disagreeable bluntness in their character.”

In this century many things have occurred to modify the differences in the habits of the sexes, to bring men and women more into the same current of ideas, occupations, amusements. To a much greater extent than formerly the evolution of women is proceeding along the same lines as the evolution of men. In the last century men regarded women as--

“made only to take possession of their hearts, and seldom or never to afford any amusement to their minds. They prefer the pleasure of toasting their healths in a tavern to that of chatting with them in a circle. They treat them as if they had been as much of another species as of another sex. For the most part they look on them as good for nothing but to dissipate their vapours or ease the fatigue of business.”

They now regard them as comrades instead of playthings.