[1] "_The haughtiest_."--Which, however, is very doubtful. Such, certainly, was the popular impression. But people who knew Mr. Pitt intimately have always ascribed to him a nature the most amiable and social, under an unfortunate reserve of manner. Whilst, on the contrary, Mr. Fox, ultra democratic in his principles and frank in his address, was repulsively aristocratic in his temper and sympathies. [2] I have sometimes had occasion to remark, as a noticeable phenomenon of our present times, that the order of ladies called _bluestockings,_ by way of reproach, has become totally extinct amongst us, except only here and there with superannuated clingers to obsolete remembrances. The reason of this change is interesting; and I do not scruple to call it honorable to our intellectual progress. In the last (but still more in the penultimate) generation, any tincture of literature, of liberal curiosity about science, or of ennobling interest in books, carried with it an air of something unsexual, mannish, and (as it was treated by the sycophantish satirists that for ever humor the prevailing folly) of something ludicrous. This mode of treatment was possible so long as the literary class of ladies formed a feeble minority. But now, when two vast peoples, English and American, counting between them forty-nine millions, when the leaders of transcendent civilization (to say nothing of Germany and France) behold their entire educated class, male and female alike, calling out, not for _Panem et circenses_, (Give us this day our daily bread and our games of the circus,) but for _Panem et literas_, (Give us this day our daily bread and literature,) the universality of the call has swept away the very name of _bluestocking_; the very possibility of the ridicule has been undermined by stern realities; and the verbal expression of the reproach is fast becoming, not simply obsolete, but even unintelligible to our juniors. By the way, the origin of this term _bluestocking_ has never been satisfactorily accounted for, unless the reader should incline to think _my_ account satisfactory. I incline to that opinion myself. Dr. Bisset (in his Life of Burke) traces it idly to a _sobriquet_ imposed by Mrs. Montagu, and the literary ladies of her circle, upon a certain obscure Dr. Stillingfleet, who was the sole masculine assistant at their literary sittings in Portman Square, and chose, upon some inexplicable craze, to wear blue stockings. The translation, however, of this name from the doctor's legs to the ladies' legs is still unsolved. That great _hiatus _needs filling up. I, therefore, whether erroneously or not, in reviewing a German historical work of some pretensions, where this problem emerges, rejected the Portman Square doctor altogether, and traced the term to an old Oxford statute--one of the many which meddle with dress, and which charges it as a point of conscience upon loyal scholastic students that they shall wear cerulean socks.