as an equally southern people, had the same original
temperament: but the stern character of their national discipline,
like that of the Spartans, made them an example of the opposite type
of national character; the greater strength of their natural feelings
being chiefly apparent in the intensity which the same original
temperament made it possible to give to the artificial. If these
cases exemplify what a naturally excitable people may be made, the
Irish Celts afford one of the aptest examples of what they are when
left to themselves; (if those can be said to be left to themselves
who have been for centuries under the indirect influence of bad
government, and the direct training of a Catholic hierarchy and of a
sincere belief in the Catholic religion.) The Irish character must be
considered, therefore, as an unfavourable case: yet, whenever the
circumstances of the individual have been at all favourable, what
people have shown greater capacity for the most varied and
multifarious individual eminence? Like the French compared with the
English, the Irish with the Swiss, the Greeks or Italians compared
with the German races, so women compared with men may be found, on
the average, to do the same things with some variety in the
particular kind of excellence. But, that they would do them fully as
well on the whole, if their education and cultivation were adapted to
correcting instead of aggravating the infirmities incident to their
temperament, I see not the smallest reason to doubt.

Supposing it, however, to be true that women's minds are by nature
more mobile than those of men, less capable of persisting long in the
same continuous effort, more fitted for dividing their faculties
among many things than for travelling in any one path to the highest
point which can be reached by it: this may be true of women as they
now are (though not without great and numerous exceptions), and may
account for their having remained behind the highest order of men in
precisely the things in which this absorption of the whole mind in
one set of ideas and occupations may seem to be most requisite.
Still, this difference is one which can only affect the kind of
excellence, not the excellence itself, or its practical worth: and it
remains to be shown whether this exclusive working of a part of the
mind, this absorption of the whole thinking faculty in a single
subject, and concentration of it on a single work, is the normal and
healthful con