upon the universal fair fame, and suggest to the inexperienced a horrible suspicion of everybody and of everything around them. Private scandal has no cloak to keep it from the contempt of every one whose opinion is worth caring for. Public scandal, which-strange shame to think of! is to be found in no hands more frequent than in those of women, puts on the robes of the preacher, and asserts for itself one of the highest of moral uses. Nothing in this country, which we have ever seen or heard of, dares go so far as the Letters of Miss Beecher. But why, of all classes in the world, our tender young girls, the margin of innocence, and, if you will, ignorance, which we are all heartily glad to believe in, fringing the garment of the sadder world, should be instructed in all the delicate social questions of an artificial life, and put up to every possible emergency of all the relationships between men and women, it seems to us impossible to conceive. Not to say that it is ridiculously unfair in the first instance, for people don't write books for the lads their compeers, instructing them how to arrange their love-affairs, and informing them what the young ladies think of their general conduct. The unfortunate boys have to collect their information on this subject at first hand, or to take the hints of their favourite novels; and we really think it might be a happy experiment to suspend all the talk for a generation, and leave their partners to follow their example.

We have left ourselves no great space to consider the circumstances of that inconsiderable and inferior portion of the feminine population of these kingdoms, the married women, for whose benefit law itself has been moving, and Parliament talking itself hoarse. We say for whose benefit but we are glad to think that the new Act, whatever its action may be, so far from having been called for by any clamour of public necessity, is more a matter of theoretical justice, proved by individual cases, than of anything more broad and general. The progress of popular opinion had made it notable that there was one case

in the jurisprudence of the country, in which a man of the richer classes could get himself relieved, and in which a man of the poorer could not; along with which, universal experience proved likewise, that, save under the unlikely circumstances of a sudden and extraordinary prostration of morals, divorce was by no means likely to be a favourite speculation in this empire. It is not very much with divorce, however, that women have to do. Save in cases horrible and extreme, that is not the woman's remedy. No law, no argument, no manner of thinking, can change the primitive order of nature; and in spite of all the risks of female inconsequence and vehemence, experience and reason alike prove that a woman must be frightfully put to it before she will cast from herself the name, if that were all, which is borne by her children, and which she herself has borne for years. This looks a small and superficial consideration, but there is more in it than meets the eye; it is one great demonstration, subtle and universal, of that different position of man and woman, which no law can alter. We can conceive no circumstances, for our own part, which could make the position of a woman, who had divorced her husband, tolerable to the ordinary feelings of the women of this country. So far as women are concerned, it must always remain the dreadful alternative of an evil which has such monstrous and unnatural aggravations as to be beyond all limits of possible endurance. We cannot comprehend it else; and with safe means of separation extended to them, very few even of the wives most bitterly insulted would desire, we should suppose, to adopt this last means of escape. For the power of lawful and formal separation placed within their reach, and for the possible security of their property and earnings, women unhappily compelled to bring their miseries into public vision may well be grateful; and we can suppose, that for women without children the new regulations must be all that could be desired. But who shall open the terrible complication of the rights of fathers and

mothers? What Solomon shall venture to divide between the two that most precious and inalienable of all treasures, the unfortunate child whose very existence stands as a ceaseless protest of nature against their disjunction? From this most painful branch of the question the law retreats, not daring to put in its hand. The present state of affairs is not just is cruel, frightful, almost intolerable but national legislation, and all the wisdom of the wise, can find no arbitrary and universal law which could be juster. There is none, let us seek it where we will. Crime itself does not abrogate natural rights and quench natural love; and so long as there are divorced and separated parents, there must be in one way or other, on one side or another, a certain amount of painful and bitter injustice. Women, so far as the law goes, are at present the sufferers, and not the benefited parties; but if the arrangement were reversed, the principle would still be exactly the same. Partition can be made of worldly goods-security obtained for the wages of labour and the gifts of inheritance but the great gift of God to married people remains undividable-a difficulty which the law shrinks from encountering, and which no human power can make plain. This is not a hardship of legislation, but one of nature. We are very slow to acknowledge the hardships of nature in these days, and still more reluctant to put up with them. All the progress which we have really made, and all the additional and fictitious progress which exists in our imagination, prompt us to the false idea that there is a remedy for everything, and that no pain is inevitable. But there are pains which are inevitable in spite of philosophy, and conflicting claims to which Solomon himself could do no justice. We are not complete syllogisms, to be kept in balance by intellectual regulations, we human creatures. We are of all things and creatures in the world the most incomplete; and there are conditions of our warfare, for the redress of which, in spite of all the expedients of social economy, every man

and woman, thrown by whatever accident out of the course of nature, must be content to wait perhaps for years, perhaps for a life long, perhaps till the consummation of all things.

It is, however, an unfortunate feature in the special literature which professes to concern itself with women, that it is in great part limited to personal " cases and individual details, and those incidents of domestic life which it is so easy, by the slightest shade of mistaken colouring, to change the real character of. The disputed questions and aggrieved feelings which rise between near relatives are, of all other human matters, the most difficult to settle; and arbitrary critics, who see this " case" and the other, from their own point of view-who are most probably informed only on one side, and have all their own theories and prejudices to sway their judgment at all times make sad havoc with known facts and principles of human conduct, and often offer us a ludicrous travestie of the life which they profess to judge and set in order. All the greater questions of existence are common to men and women alike, and common to the higher literature which belongs equally to both. A kind of literature which is meant exclusively for one, must of necessity be an inferior species, and limits itself by its very profession of wisdom. Perhaps, if some pedagogic genius of "the male sect were to address moral volumes to the husbands and brothers of England - to instruct them in the rights, privileges, and duties of their sex, and expound their true and wisest position towards the other, the eyes of female moralists might be opened to the true nature of their own prelections. No man, however, does so; the young men are supposed to be sufficiently instructed by the Gospel and the law, home and literature, life itself, and ordinary experience; the Gospel and the law of Heaven-the literature and the home of British purity-life in its truest sense, and experience of all those greatest incidents and events which guide it, belong to women as fully and as freely as they do to men. It is possible in these days to be

well-read, well-informed-to have the loftiest poetry, the highest philosophy, the purest eloquence, open to one's mind, for one's own private delight and improvement, without knowing Latin or Greek; and Latin and Greek even are not impossible achieve ments, though they form the most remarkable difference, so far as we are aware, between the education of our sons and that of our daughters. But the supplementary literature of a sex -the private and particular address to one portion of humanity-is, however high its professions, nothing better than a confession of foolishness. It is as much as to say, over and over, with an undesirable repetition, that what is enough for the brother is not enough for the sister that what the poets and philosophers, and even the apostles and prophets, have said and written, is primarily for him, and not for her; and that a secondary course of morals is the necessary food for the less noble capacity. If women in general adopt this theory, nobody of course has any right to thwart them; but every honest critic, loving the benefit of the race, which is not a question of one but of both, ought to raise his voice against so petty and partial a policy. Everything which lowers the mind to a primary consideration of its own

personal feelings, circumstances, and emotions, or which sets it speculating on the individual emotions, circumstances, and feelings of its neighbours, is in the end a process of debasement; and we should think it a very miserable prospect for the future, could we suppose, that while literature in general, and their Bible, is all we adopt for the moral guidance of our boys, our girls required the artificial bolstering of a quite additional support of virtue; and to protect them from becoming useless, vain, discontented, repining, and good-for-nothing, it was necessary to support a staff of volunteer lecturers, to communicate to them a certain esprit du corps, and make their womanhood, instead of a fact of nature, a kind of profession. If this is the case, is it not an odd mistake

not for the young people in love, who are privileged to say anything, but for our very philosophers themselves, who do all the supplementary feminine morality-to hold fast still by the old assertion that womanhood is purer by native right than manhood, and that women still are next to the angels? If they are, they ought to need rather less than more lecturing than falls to the share of the more obdurate rebel; either one thing or the other must be untrue.

THE Manager had not submitted to the loss of his property in Sophy and £100, without taking much vain trouble to recover the one or the other. He had visited Jasper while that gentleman lodged in St James's, but the moment he hinted at the return of the £100, Mr Losely opened both door and window, and requested the manager to make his immediate choice of the two. Taking the more usual mode of exit, Mr Rugge vented his just indignation in a lawyer's letter, threatening Mr Losely with an action for conspiracy and fraud. He had also more than once visited Mrs Crane, who somewhat soothed him by allowing that he had been very badly used, that he ought at least to be repaid his money, and promising to do her best to persuade Mr Losely to "behave like a gentleman." With regard to Sophy herself, Mrs Crane appeared to feel a profound indifference. In fact, the hatred which Mrs Crane had unquestionably conceived for Sophy while under her charge, was much diminished by Losely's unnatural conduct towards the child. To her it was probably a matter of no interest whether Sophy was in Rugge's hands or Waife's; enough for her that the daughter of a woman against whose memory her fiercest passions were enlisted was, in either case, so far below herself in the grades of the social ladder. Perhaps of the two protectors for Sophy-Rugge and Waife-her spite alone would have given the preference to Waife. He was on a still lower step of the ladder than the itinerant manager. Nor, though she had so mortally injured the forlorn cripple in the eyes of Mr Hartopp, had she any deliberate purpose of revenge to gratify against him! On the contrary, if she viewed him with con

VOL. LXXXIII.-NO. DVIII.

tempt, it was a contempt not unmixed with pity. It was necessary to make to the Mayor the communications she had made, or that worthy magistrate would not have surrendered the child intrusted to him, at least until Waife's return. And really it was a kindness to the old man to save him both from an agonising scene with Jasper, and from the more public opprobrium which any resistance on his part to Jasper's authority, or any altercation between the two, would occasion. And as her main object then was to secure Losely's allegiance to her, by proving her power to be useful to him, so Waifes, and Sophys, and Mayors, and Managers, were to her but as pawns to be moved and sacrificed, according to the leading strategy of her game.

Rugge came now, agitated and breathless, to inform Mrs Crane that Waife had been seen in London. Mr Rugge's clown had seen him, not far from the Tower; but the cripple had disappeared before the clown, who was on the top of an omnibus, had time to descend. And even if he had actually caught hold of Mr Waife," observed Mrs Crane, "what then? You have no claim on Mr Waife."

"But the Phenomenon must be with that ravishing marauder,” said Rugge. "However, I have set a minister of justice-that is, ma'am, a detective police-at work; and what I now ask of you is simply this: should it be necessary for Mr Losely to appear with me before the senatethat is to say, ma'am, a metropolitan police-court-in order to prove my legal property in my own bought and paid-for Phenomenon, will you induce that bold bad man not again to return the poisoned chalice to my lips?"

M

"I do not even know where Mr Losely is perhaps not in London." "Ma'am, I saw him last night at the theatre- Princess's. I was in the shilling gallery. He who owes me £100, ma'am-he in a private box!" 66 Ah! you are sure; by himself?" "With a lady, ma'am—a lady in a shawl from Ingee. I know them shawls. My father taught me to know them in early childhood, for he was an ornament to British commerce -a broker, ma'am-pawn! And," continued Rugge, with a withering smile, "that man in a private box, which at the Princess's costs two pounds two, and with the spoils of Ingee by his side, lifted his eye-glass and beheld me-me in the shilling gallery!-and his conscience did not say should we not change places if I paid that gentleman £100 Can such things be, and overcome us, ma'am, like a summer cloud, without our special-I put it to you, ma'amwonder?"

6

"Oh, with a lady, was he!" exclaimed Arabella Crane-her wrath, which, while the manager spoke, gathered fast and full, bursting now into words: "His ladies shall know the man who sells his own child for a show; only find out where the girl is, then come here again before you stir further. Oh, with a lady! Go to your detective policeman, or rather, send him to me; we will first discover Mr Losely's address. I will pay all the expenses. Rely on my zeal, Mr Rugge.'

Much comforted, the manager went his way. He had not been long gone before Jasper himself appeared. The traitor entered with a more than customary bravado of manner, as if he apprehended a scolding, and was prepared to face it; but Mrs Crane neither reproached him for his prolonged absence, nor expressed surprise at his return. With true feminine duplicity she received him as if nothing had happened. Jasper, thus relieved, became of his own accord apologetic and explanatory; evidently he wanted something of Mrs Crane. "The fact is, my dear friend," said he, sinking into a chair, "that the day after I last saw you, I happened to go to the General Post-office to see if there were any letters for me. You

Ho

smile-you don't believe me. nour bright, here they are,” and Jasper took from the side-pocket of his coat a pocket-book-a new pocketbook-a brilliant pocket-book-fragrant Russian leather-delicately embossed golden clasps-silken linings

jewelled pencil-case malachite penknife-an arsenal of nicknacks stored in neat recesses; such a pocketbook as no man ever gives to himself. Sardanapalus would not have given that pocket-book to himself! Such a pocket-book never comes to you, oh enviable Lotharios, save as tributary keepsakes from the charmers who adore you! Grimly the Adopted Mother eyed that pocket-book. Never had she seen it before. Grimly she pinched her lips. Out of this dainty volume-which would have been of cumbrous size to a slim thread-paper exquisite, but scarcely bulged into ripple the Atlantic expanse of Jasper Losely's magnificent chest-the monster drew forth two letters on French paper-foreign postmarks. He replaced them quickly, only suffering her eye to glance at the address, and continued: "Fancy! that purse-proud Grand Turk of an infidel, tho' he would not believe me, has been to France-yes, actually to * * * * * making inquiries evidently with reference to Sophy. The woman who ought to have thoroughly converted him took flight, however, and missed seeing him. Confound her! I ought to have been there. So I have no doubt for the.present the Pagan remains stubborn. Gone on into Italy, I hear; doing me, violating the laws of nature, and roving about the world, with his own solitary hands in his bottomless pockets,like the Wandering Jew! But, as some slight set-off in my run of illluck, I find at the Post-office a pleasanter letter than the one which brings me this news: A rich elderly lady, who has no family, wants to adopt a nice child, will take Sophy; make it worth my while to let her have Sophy. Tis convenient in a thousand ways to settle one's child comfortably in a rich house-establishes rights, subject, of course, to cheques which would not affront me -a Father! But the first thing requisite is to catch Sophy; 'tis in that I