. He remembers that when, in reply to the
lady-principal's inquiry how he liked his class, he answered, with the
strictest intellectual reference, that they were "charming," the stern
matron suggested that another adjective would perhaps be more
appropriate. He felt his whole moral sense as a teacher ebbing away.

In the case of men he would insist on a thorough treatment of his
subject, and would avoid sentiment and personal details as insults to
their intelligence; but what is he to do with rows of pretty faces that
grow black as he touches upon the dialect of Socrates, but kindle into
life and animation when he depicts the sage's snub nose? Anecdotes,
pretty stories, snatches of poetical quotation, slip in more and more
as the students perceive and exercise their power. Men, too, are either
intelligent or unintelligent, but the unhappy Professor at a Ladies'
College soon perceives that he has to deal with a class of minds which
are both at once. A luckless gentleman, after lecturing for forty
minutes, found that the lecture had been most carefully listened to and
reproduced in the note-books, but with the trifling substitution in
every instance of the word "Phoenician" for "Venetian." Above all, he
is puzzled with the profuse employment of these note-books.

To the Platonic girl her note-book takes the place of the old-fashioned
diary. It is scribbled down roughly at the lecture and copied out fairly
at night. It used to be a frightful thought that every evening, before
retiring to rest, the girl with whom one had been chatting intended
seriously to probe the state of her heart and set down her affections in
black and white; but it is hardly less formidable to imagine her
refusing to lay her head on her pillow before she has finished her fair
copy of the battle of Salamis. The universality of female studies, too,
astounds the teacher who is fresh from the world of man; he stands
aghast before a girl who is learning four languages at once, besides
attending courses on logic, music, and the use of the globes. This
omnivorous appetite for knowledge he finds to co-exist with a great
weakness in the minor matters of spelling, and a profound indifference
to the simplest rules of grammar. We do not wonder then at Professors
being a little shy of Ladies' Colleges; nor is it less easy to see why
the Platonic theory of education has taken so little with the girls
themselves. After all, the grievance of which they complain has