the mark. The strings were beginning to get tangled and to respond no longer to the hand that played with them with a political purpose, and it failed, in spite of skilful combinations and strong personal influence. In later attempts the failure was still more marked; to watch the pulling at bell-wires that rang no bells became to the looker-on oppressive and sometimes ludicrous. Before we leave the last of the salons for duller company, there is one personality who ought to find a place in a sketch, however slight, of the world in which Lady Palmerston and Lady Granville reigned supreme. Lady William Russell did not attempt to hold a salon; she spent much of her time abroad, and, when she came to England, lived in the simplest foreign way, her establishment consisting of few servants beyond her courier and her maid. But, though not attempting the role of hostess, she was almost indispensable at the salons of her friends, and still more so at the small recherché dinners which were the fashion among the crème de la crème. She was by far the strongest personality of that time, a powerful woman, powerful to violence. (So said rumour.) To the fascination which strength of character gives its owner she added the charm of being so free from insularity and provincialism that many people were puzzled as to her nationality. Each country claimed her as its own. A Parisian was at once arrested by her wittily expressed appreciation of both ancient and modern régime, of both solid and frivolous literature in France. Then she might be heard talking to the German Ambassador on abstruse political questions; she was equally able, in the purest Tuscan, to discuss with an Italian cardinal the latest news from the Vatican. All this without the slightest pose or effort. She brought up her three sons in a way of her own, utterly unlike any English system of education ever heard of. A Catholic herself, she hated the priest, and wished to have only inscribed on her grave: The mother of Hastings, Odo, and Arthur.'

We must leave these interesting personalities and pass on to a very dull epoch, glancing on the way at the theological High Church phase kindly interpreted by Miss Sewell and Miss Yonge. An ideal founded on the inculcation of obedience to the Church, instilled in brothers and cousins from Oxford, gave the more intelligent of the young women in the fifties some perception of what culture might imply; but its pursuit was on the whole uninteresting, still more so were the lives of their frivolous sisters, made up as they were mainly of a great deal of silliness, of love of dress that didn't result in good dress, of flirtations with no background of wit, vice sometimes having its turn at the wheel; but even the vice of that period was dull.

We have arrived at the point at which we may consider the question with which we started--what is common to the French

women of the eighteenth century and the English of the nineteenthand this misgiving arises. Are not the dissimilarities so marked as to destroy all resemblance? Yet it is the one interesting point in the study, so the doubt must be conquered. An additional difficulty lies in the avoidance of any portrait-painting. Just as the roman à clef is generally very poor art, so in an essay, however unpretending, it would be odious to bolster up the interest by dealing with distinct personalities and not with types. Time is pressing, and someone else said the other day, à propos of the expression, 'Now the psychological moment has arrived.' You are talking as they did in the early nineties, and the types change before your very eyes. Why, ten or fifteen years ago we had the academic fad. The higher education of women was the cry. It touched Society vaguely: Lady So-and-so was determined to send her daughters to Girton or Newnham. The ordinary English and even French governesses were made to wince when comparisons were made between the effect of their teaching and the result of a college course. In many a middle or professional home it came as a solution to the dreary problem of how the girls of the family were to earn their bread, besides giving them the unexpected joy of finding their brains to be undoubtedly fit for something. Those who hate academic training in either men or women railed at the naïf belief that to follow the exact curriculum which produced such poor results in men would advance the general status of women. Its evident narrowness and want of elasticity could not strike the enthusiastic promoters of the higher education. Enthusiasts are usually found to be without a sense of humour, and the inefficiency and defects of the women's colleges were scarcely apparent even to outsiders, who were, if in sympathy with the movement, too full of admiration for the wonderful energy and zeal, the untiring and self-denying devotion, of the founders to find it in their hearts to criticise. They did not observe the deteriorating effect of the strain of over-work during the growing years of the young girls who were forced into competition with strong inen, the majority of whom cared not to beat them. Every faculty was bent to the task of obtaining marks. Commercially it answered to send such well-equipped teachers into the market, and this, in a way, met one of the pressing wants of the day. But later, in the homes of the intelligent classes, this practical solution was before long pronounced to be inadequate, and disappointment was felt by the parents of the very hard, trenchant, cut-and-dried young prig who returned from time to time to the home she had learned to contemn. Now, the colleges have proved that they have to deal with influences more potent even than ignorance. In Society the ineradicable love of dress and the eternal power of physical beauty prevented at any time any great warmth of enthusiasm in the direction of intellectual training. Men disliked it. They had been used to the toy and doll's house theory. Useless to

quote women of past ages; neither men nor women had imagination enough to see that, with all their weaknesses, not to speak of their vices, the women of the Middle Ages were a superior kind of animal to the average Englishwoman of the last decade of the nineteenth century.

The cult of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages did far more to raise the status of women than any other cause at work since the age of chivalry, and the efforts towards intellectual discipline in our day are futile in comparison. Still, these efforts indirectly affected later developments of women's energies, and may play a considerable part in the history of the woman of the twentieth century than we expect at present.

The new woman' followed the student, but was gradually demolished by common consent, and the artillery spent in her destruction some ten years ago by such opponents as Mrs. Lynn Linton, of the Saturday Review, was rather a waste of force.

The new woman is extinct, and our next stage in this study— ie. a sketch of The Souls '-brings us very near the present day. Two or three pretty and half a dozen intelligent as well as pretty women may be said to have been the nucleus round which gathered the small and very pleasant company about whom at one moment so much nonsense was talked, and upon whom was lavished much adverse and a great deal of unnecessary criticism. This little society made a homely pleasant start. Some five or six girls and their married friends met once a week, to compare notes on the books they read, and to try their hand at writing their impressions. This was the humble beginning of the so-to-speak club which attracted considerable attention at the time, but which, from exaggerated spirit of clique on one side and the love of detraction combined with irritation at exclusiveness on the other, died a natural death. It made intelligence the fashion for the moment, a false step whose traces may be found in Society even at the present day. Don't ask So-and-so to join us,' one of the members said of her friend, for she will only work for your soul.' Hence the name 'Souls.' The married friends, some brilliant and distinguished, others scarcely so, but all good-natured and kind, contributed by their hospitality and pleasant receptions in some of the most delightful houses in London to widen the sphere of the souls. A few distinguished men, entering into the spirit of the affair, increased their number to some fifty; but naturally a small company of brilliant men and women did not meet frequently to limit themselves to writing essays and discussing ethics, and the mole of human passions began to undermine the citadel. The enemy from outside, mad to get in and share the spoils, found the ground give way beneath their feet. They were not allowed to share the game, but the game had lasted long enough; the players had dispersed

6

from weariness, and the whole movement remains only a very pleasant recollection to some, and the source of unreasonable provocation to others. From the time of the Souls to the present day, anyone who cared to study the human comedy, as played in English life by Englishwomen in the last decade of the nineteenth century, would find many types ready to hand which would repay him for the effort he must make to compare and sort the material that composed them. This material is sometimes ungrateful stuff to handle, trivial, second rate, and sometimes tiresome, but other subjects spring up in the investigation-interesting puzzles, perplexing contradictions in characters; still, none without the capacity to appreciate an intelligent aptitude for taking their surroundings from the right angle, and the days in which they lived in right proportion, suggesting the reflection that, in some respects, no other period could have given us the same food for thought and comment.

Another kind of material the past might furnish-more frank, more strong, but not so helpful for our present purpose. Let us discriminate and try to group our impressions; yet in grouping there is the danger of drawing a hard-and-fast line between the groups, and we might lose sight of the fact that where these groups touch each other there is a thrill of communication which brings them all en rapport. We shall see there is no actual boundary line between one group and another, but that they act and react on each other all the way down the line, as indeed has ever been the case since the days of the Tatler, who tells us that she (the belle in secondrate Society) sees Lady Betty idle and coquet it with Lord Dimple. She resolves to imitate that sweet creature, and longs to be en famille with a nobleman.' To point out that this rapprochement exists may prove to be an answer to a very obvious criticism which might well be directed against this humble study of manners. These young women,' my critic may say, 'may be interesting, admirable, or reprehensible as the case may be, in your eyes and in those of a small knot of friends, but you will not tell me that it matters very much what they say or do. The great pulse of life in England, influenced, as in all other countries, by the lives of women, will not beat slower or faster because this section of society elects to take its stand on a high or a low plane.' But my answer is: Certainly I do assert that it signifies enormously what these women say or do.' The first group is, as I have tried to show, consciously or unconsciously imitated by the other. It does not perhaps amount to the frenzy of imitation and competition that drove, in New York last year, some young and beautiful women to suicide because they were unable to reach the standard of expensive living and fashionable dressing which the dozen, vulgarly called leaders of Society, had pronounced to be indispensable; but, if we look more closely at

home, we shall detect a strange likeness to what we may have seen in London running through each grade of Society, and we recognise the trick of manner and dress, the pursuit of some occupation, evidently inspired and not natural, in some obscure country town. This leavening may be due to some, perhaps, very few personalities in each of our supposed groups, the generality of women following the lead of the few capable ones and rushing headlong through the gate with no knowledge or preconception of what the leaders have in mind. And this, I say, does signify very much, though it is difficult to say what the outcome of it all will be.

To return to our groups. Let us look into No. 1, Group A. The general description would be very smart, pretty, very well dressed. The best witty, and, above all, pleasant; intelligence quick as lightning, but insufficient, sometimes showing literary aptitude and taste; with quick apprehension of how to rule ; inexorable in establishing and maintaining that rule undisputed, a convincing charm that admits of no doubt or rebellion, and brooking no contradiction, is never disputed or opposed. The worst: playing at passion without feeling its force, at sentiment without the slightest hint of poetry or the remotest glint of imagination. Neither the best nor the worst ever shows the slightest scruple on any point. To charm away a friend's husband, still better, her lover, is a sport in which both take an open and undisguised delight. The real power they wield is shown in the subjection of the very first-rate men, who never think of resisting them. The paramount merit of this group is that they make no pretence to be either virtuous or vicious. They may be one or the other, probably the latter, but you will never find them boasting of their evil ways, not even of their most objectionable talk. They leave this to Group B, who do both with a falsely rakish air, which is much more offensive than are the worst traits of Group A. They are not so smart, and are furious if not thought so pretty. They distinctly imitate the others, cross the border into the A camp, and are proud of so doing. Here we find a little touch of tawdriness and snobbism. They have a weakness for rank which, of course, A is absolutely free from, and they carry the tradition of the former in dress, in manners and pursuits, into the county families in whose houses they reproduce what they have imitated, and subjugate baronets by the dozen, to return to rather a second-rate season in London.

Group C.-Literary, often really intellectual. We omit all criticism of their brain work, this being not the place for it, and we note that the best members of this group simply and naturally delight in their vocation, and are more than indulgent to outsiders less gifted than themselves. Perhaps they are too willing to admire the quick facility of the would-be intelligent. The worst in Group