In those days, as in these, and much more tyrannically than in these, Mrs. Grundy had her silly daughters, ready to talk slander and folly about any good woman who disregarded her. To Miss Nightingale she simply did not exist. Miss Martineau was right when she wrote of her that “to her it was a small thing to be judged by man’s judgment.” And the spirit in which she chose the women who were to go out under her to the Crimea may be judged by later words of her own, called forth by a discussion of fees for nurses—words in which the italics are mine, though the sentence is quoted here to show the scorn she poured on fashion’s canting view of class distinction. “I have seen,” she said, “somewhere in print that nursing is a profession to be followed by the ‘lower middle-class.’ Shall we say that painting or sculpture is a profession to be followed by the ‘lower middle-class’? _Why limit the class at all?_ Or shall we say that God is only to be served in His sick by the ‘lower middle-class’? “_It appears to be the most futile of all distinctions to classify as between ‘paid’ and unpaid art, so between ‘paid’ and unpaid nursing, to make into a test a circumstance as adventitious as whether the hair is black or brown—viz., whether people have private means or not, whether they are obliged or not to work at their art or their nursing for a livelihood._ Probably no person ever did that well which he did only for money. Certainly no person ever did that well which he did not work at as hard as if he did it solely for money. If by amateur in art or in nursing are meant those who take it up for play, it is not art at all, it is not nursing at all. _You never yet made an artist by paying him well; but an artist ought to be well paid._” The woman who in later life wrote this, and all her life acted on it, could not only well afford to let _Punch_ have his joke about the nightingales who would shortly turn into ringdoves—although, indeed, _Punch’s_ verses and illustration were delightful in their innocent fun—but could even without flinching let vulgar slander insinuate its usual common-minded nonsense. She herself has written in _Nursing Notes_:— “The everyday management of a large ward, let alone of a hospital, the knowing what are the laws of life and death for men, and what the laws of health for wards (and wards are healthy or unhealthy mainly according to the knowledge or ignorance of the nurse)—are not these matters of sufficient importance and difficulty to require learning by experience and careful inquiry, just as much as any other art? They do not come by inspiration to the lady disappointed in love, nor to the poor workhouse drudge hard up for a livelihood. And terrible is the injury which has followed to the sick from such wild notions.”