Imagine what a blue-book would be in these times--would there be any reading could compare with it? We used to admire a certain diplomatist--a pleasant narrator of court gossip--giving, as he did, little traits of Kings and Kaisers, and telling us the way in which majesty was graciously pleased to blow his royal nose. Imagine a female pen engaged on such themes! What clever and sharp little touches would reveal the whole tone of a “reception”! We should not be told “His Majesty received me coldly,” but we would have a beautiful analysis of the royal mind in all its varied moods of displeasure, concealment, urbanity, reserve, and deception. Compared with the male version of the same incident, it would be like Faraday’s report on a case of supposed poisoning beside the blundering narrative of a country apothecary! It is a long time--a very long time--before an old country has energy enough to throw off any of its accustomed ways. It requires the vigorous assault of young and sturdy intelligences, and, above all, immense persistence, to effect it. Light comes very slowly indeed through the fog of centuries’ growth, and there is hope always when even the faintest flicker of a ray pierces the Boeotian cloud. Now, for some years back, it may have been remarked that a sort of suspicion has been breaking on the minds of our rulers, that the finer, the higher, and subtler organisations of women might find their suitable sphere of occupation in the diplomatic service. “I don’t speak German, but I play the German flute,” said the apologetic gentleman; and so might we say. We don’t engage ladies in diplomacy, but we employ all the old women of our own sex! Wherever we find a well-mannered, soft-spoken, fussy old soul, with a taste for fine clothes and fine dinners, fond of court festivities, and heart and soul devoted to royalties, we promote him. If he speak French tolerably, we make him a Minister; if he be fluent, an Envoy Extraordinary. I remember an old medical lecturer in Dublin formerly, who used to hold forth on the Materia Medica in the hall of the University, and who, seeing a “student” whose studies had been for some time before pursued in Germany, appear in the lecture-room, with a note-book and pen to take down the lecture-- “Tell that young gentleman,” said the Professor, “to put up his writing materials, for there’s not one word he’ll hear from me that he’ll not find in the oldest editions of the ‘Dublin Pharmacopoeia.’” In the same spirit our diplomatists may sneer at the call for blue-books. We have all of us had the whole thing already in the ‘Times;’ and why? Because we choose to employ unsuitable tools. We want to shave with a hatchet instead of a razor; for be it remarked, as no things are so essentially unlike as those that have a certain resemblance, there is nothing in nature so remote from the truly feminine finesse as the mind of a male “old woman.”