dice, very strongly rooted in the social
conventions of the time, about masculine and feminine accomplishments.
The educations of the two sexes were so trenchantly separated that
neither had access to the knowledge of the other. The men had learned
Latin and Greek, of which the women were ignorant; the women had learned
French or Italian, which the men could neither read nor speak. The
ladies studied fine art, not seriously, but it occupied a good deal of
their time and thoughts; the gentlemen had a manly contempt for it,
which kept them, as contempt always does, in a state of absolute
ignorance. The intellectual separation of the sexes was made as complete
as possible by the conventionally received idea that a man could not
learn what girls learned without effeminacy, and that if women aspired
to men's knowledge they would forfeit the delicacy of their sex. This
illogical prejudice was based on a bad syllogism of this kind:--

Girls speak French, and learn music and drawing.

Benjamin speaks French, and learns music and drawing.

Benjamin is a girl.

And the prejudice, powerful as it was, had not even the claim of any
considerable antiquity. Think how strange and unreasonable it would have
seemed to Lady Jane Grey and Sir Philip Sidney! In their time, ladies
and gentlemen studied the same things, the world of culture was the same
for both, and they could meet in it as in a garden.

Happily we are coming back to the old rational notion of culture as
independent of the question of sex. Latin and Greek are not unfeminine;
they were spoken by women in Athens and Rome; the modern languages are
fit for a man to learn, since men use them continually on the
battle-fields and in the parliaments and exchanges of the world. Art is
a manly business, if ever any human occupation could be called manly,
for the utmost efforts of the strongest men are needed for success in
it.

The increasing interest in the fine arts, the more important position
given to modern languages in the universities, the irresistible
attractions and growing authority of science, all tend to bring men and
women together on subjects understood by both, and therefore operate
directly in favor of intellectual interests in marriage. You will not
suspect me of a snobbish desire to pay compliments to royalty if I trace
some of these changes in public opinion to the example and influence of
the Prince Consort, operating with some effect during his life, y