Her own education she always protested was of the worst and flimsiest character, and her girlish scorn at the restraints that cramped and fettered her is expressed vigorously enough in the well-known letter to Bishop Burnet. It was considered almost criminal, she complains, to improve her reason, or even to fancy she had any. To be learned was to be held up to universal ridicule, and the only line of conduct open to her was to play the fool in concert with other women of quality, “whose birth and leisure merely serve to make them the most useless and worthless part of creation.” Yet viewed alongside of her contemporaries, Lady Mary’s advantages were really quite unusual. She had some little guidance in her studies, with no particular opposition to overcome, and tolerance was as much at any time as a thoughtful girl could hope for. Nearly a century later we find little Mary Fairfax--afterwards Mrs. Somerville, and the most learned woman in England--being taught how to sew, to read her Bible, and to learn the Shorter Catechism; all else being considered superfluous for a female. Moreover, the child’s early application to her books was regarded with great disfavor by her relatives, who plainly thought that no good was likely to come of it. “I wonder,” said her rigid aunt to Lady Fairfax, “that you let Mary waste her time in reading!” “You cannot hammer a girl into anything,” says Ruskin, who has constituted himself both champion and mentor of the sex; and perhaps this was the reason that so many of these rigorously drilled and kept-down girls blossomed perversely into brilliant and scholarly women. Nevertheless, it is comforting to turn back for a moment, and see what Holland, in the seventeenth century, could do for her clever children. Mr. Gosse has shown us a charming picture of the three daughters of Roemer Visscher, the poetess Tesselschade and her less famous sisters,--three little girls, whose healthy mental and physical training was happily free from either narrow contraction or hot-house pressure. “All of them,” writes Ernestus Brink, “were practiced in very sweet accomplishments. They could play music, paint, write, and engrave on glass, make poems, cut emblems, embroider all manner of fabrics, and swim well; which last thing they had learned in their father’s garden, where there was a canal with water, outside the city.” What wonder that these little maidens, with skilled fingers, and clear heads, and vigorous bodies, grew into three keen-witted and charming women, around whom we find grouped that rich array of talent which suddenly raised Holland to a unique literary distinction! What wonder that their influence, alike refining and strengthening, was felt on every hand, and was repaid with universal gratitude and love!