ttled by the height of a sovereign's brow.

It is a relief too, now and then, to get out of the world of morals into
the world of woman; out of the hard sphere of right and wrong into a
world like Mr. Swinburne's, where judgment goes by the beautiful, and
where red hair makes all the difference between Elizabeth and Mary of
Scotland. Above all, there is the delightful consciousness of
superiority. The happiness of the blessed in the next world consists,
according to Sir John Mandeville, in their being able to behold the
agonies of the lost; and half the satisfaction men have in their own
sense and vigor and success would be lost if they could not enjoy the
delicious view of the world where sense and energy go for nothing.

Whether all this would be worth sacrificing simply to acquire a woman
who could sympathize with, and support, a man in the stress and battle
of life, is a question we do not pretend to decide; but it is certain
that the enfranchisement of woman would be the passing of a social Act
of Uniformity, and the loss of half the grace and variety of life. Here,
as elsewhere, "the low sun makes the color," and the very excellences of
Miss Hominy carry her aloft into regions of white light, where our
eyes, even if dazzled, get a little tired with the monotony of the
intellectual Haze.

The result of such a change on woman herself would be something far
greater and more revolutionary. It is not merely that, as in the case of
men, she would lose the sense and comfort of another world of thought
and action, and of its contrast with the world in which she lives; it is
that she would lose her own world altogether. Conceive, for instance,
woman obliged to take life in earnest, to study as men study, to work as
men work. The change would be no mere modification, but the utter
abolition of her whole present existence. The whole theory of woman's
life is framed on the hypothesis of sheer indolence. She is often
charming, but she is always idle. There is an immense ingenuity and a
perfect grace about her idleness; the efforts, in fact, of generations
of cultivated women have been directed, and successfully directed, to
this special object of securing absolute indolence without either the
inner tedium or the outer contempt which indolence is supposed to bring
in its train.

Woman can always say with Titus, "I have wasted a day," but the
confession wears an air of triumph rather than regret. A world of
trivial occupatio