"The late respectable Dr BEN JOHNSON, gifted author of _Boswell's Biography_ (_applause_), once rather humorously remarked, on witnessing a nautch performed by canine quadrupeds, that--although their choreographical abilities were of but a mediocre nature--the wonderment was that they should be capable at all to execute such a hind-legged feat and _tour de force_. "Similarly, it is to me a gaping marvel that womanish tongues should hold forth upon subjects which are naturally far outside the radius of their comprehensions. "The subject for our discursiveness to-night is, '_To what extent has Ibsen contributed to the Cause (if any) of Female Emancipation?_' and being a total ignoramus up to date of the sheer existence of said hon'ble gentleman, I shall abstain from scratching my head over so Sphinxian a conundrum, and confine myself to knuckling to the obiter diction of sundry lady speakers. "There was a stout full-blown matron, with grey curl-shavings and a bonnet and plumage, who declaimed her opinionated conviction that it was degrading and _infra dig._ for any woman to be treated as a doll. (_Hear, hear._) Well, I would hatch the questionable egg of a doubt whether any rationalistic masculine could regard the speaker herself in a dollish aspect, and will assure her that in my fatherland every cultivated native gentleman would approach her with the cold shoulder of apprehensive respectfulness. (_The bonneted matron becomes ruddier than the cherry with complacency, and fans herself vigorously._) "Next I shall deal with the tall, meagre female near the fire-hearth, in abbreviated hair and a nose-pinch, who set up the claim that her sex were in all essentials the equals, if not the superiors, of man. Now, without any gairish of words, I will proceed baldly to enumerate various important physical differentiations which---- (_Intervention by Hon'ble Chairwoman, reminding me that these were not in disputation._) I bow to correction, and kiss the rod by summing up the gist of my argument, viz., that it is nonsensical idiotcy to suppose that a woman can be the equivalent of a man either in intellectual gripe, in bodily robustiousness, or in physical courage. Of the last, I shall afford an unanswerable proof from my own person. It is notorious, _urbi et orbi_, that every feminine person will flee in panicstricken dismay from the approach of the smallest mouse. "I am a Bengali, and, as such, profusely endowed with the fugacious instinct, and yet, shall I quake in appalling consternation if a mouse is to invade my vicinity? "Certainly I shall not; and why? Because, though not racially a temerarious, I nevertheless appertain to the masculine sex, and consequentially my heart is not capable of contracting at the mere aspect of a rodent. This is not to blow the triumphant trumpet of sexual superiority, but to prove a simple undenied fact by dint of an _a fortiori_.