nd
tract-distributors, to women in the mass. Her influence is a quiet
protest against the injustice of the present religions of the world in
excluding woman from those ministerial functions with which Paganism
invested her. It is an odd transition from the quiet parson's wife to
the priestess of Delphi; but while the parson's wife exists there is at
any rate a persistence in the claim of woman's right to resume her
tripod again.

It is the quiet consciousness of this, of her spiritual headship of her
sex, of her mystic and unexpressed but real ecclesiastical position,
quite as much as the weariness of her daily routine, which displays
itself in the bearing of the parson's wife. She is not quite as other
women are, any more than he is as other men. Her dress is--at any rate,
in theory it ought to be--a shade quieter, her bonnets a little less
modern, her manner a trifle more reserved, her mirth hardly as
unrestrained as those of the rest of her sex. Her talk, without being
clerical, takes a quiet clerical tinge. She has her little scandal about
the archdeacon and her womanly abhorrence of that horrid Colenso. She
knows Early English from Middle Pointed, and interprets Ritualistic
phrases into intelligible vocables. Like the curate, she dances only in
family circles, and then dances after a discreet and ecclesiastical
sort. She has no objection to cards, but she plays only for love. She
sings solos from the _Messiah_ and _St. Paul_.

An existence simple, kindly enough in its way, penetrating society no
doubt with a thousand good influences, but yet, we must own, hardly very
interesting to the priestess who lives it. Altogether, when we get
beyond the purple and gold of our rulers, we congratulate ourselves on
being free from the tedium and weariness and perpetual self-restraint of
their lofty position. And even the curate who has lately raised his
faint protest against what he calls "feminine domination" may remember
in charity that while croquet and flirtation remain to him, his
existence, slavery though he deem it, is a slavery far freer, blither,
and more lively than that of the curate's wife.

WOMAN AND HER CRITICS.

We men boast, as Homer said, to be braver than our fathers; but, as a
sort of compensation, our women are far more sensitive than their
grandmothers. Phyllis has ceased to laugh at Mr. Spectator's criticisms
on her fan and her patches; but then it may be doubted whether Phyllis
ever did laugh