(it may be said without exaggeration) very little educated,
and having scarcely cultivated at all any of the higher faculties of
mind. And in those countries the men who are acquainted with the
principles of musical composition must be counted by hundreds, or
more probably by thousands, the women barely by scores: so that here
again, on the doctrine of averages, we cannot reasonably expect to
see more than one eminent woman to fifty eminent men; and the last
three centuries have not produced fifty eminent male composers either
in Germany or in Italy.

There are other reasons, besides those which we have now given, that
help to explain why women remain behind men, even in the pursuits
which are open to both. For one thing, very few women have time for
them. This may seem a paradox; it is an undoubted social fact. The
time and thoughts of every woman have to satisfy great previous
demands on them for things practical. There is, first, the
superintendence of the family and the domestic expenditure, which
occupies at least one woman in every family, generally the one of
mature years and acquired experience; unless the family is so rich as
to admit of delegating that task to hired agency, and submitting to
all the waste and malversation inseparable from that mode of
conducting it. The superintendence of a household, even when not in
other respects laborious, is extremely onerous to the thoughts; it
requires incessant vigilance, an eye which no detail escapes, and
presents questions for consideration and solution, foreseen and
unforeseen, at every hour of the day, from which the person
responsible for them can hardly ever shake herself free. If a woman
is of a rank and circumstances which relieve her in a measure from
these cares, she has still devolving on her the management for the
whole family of its intercourse with others--of what is called
society, and the less the call made on her by the former duty, the
greater is always the development of the latter: the dinner parties,
concerts, evening parties, morning visits, letter writing, and all
that goes with them. All this is over and above the engrossing duty
which society imposes exclusively on women, of making themselves
charming. A clever woman of the higher ranks finds nearly a
sufficient employment of her talents in cultivating the graces of
manner and the arts of conversation. To look only at the outward side
of the subject: the great and continual exercise of though