“We should indeed rejoice to profit in this or any undertaking by the deep wisdom which the author of the ‘Princess’ has concealed under a veil of exquisite grace and lightness; we should not wish to think less nobly than his royal heroine does of the rights and powers of her sex, but we should be more inclined to acquiesce in the conclusions of her matured experience, than to revive—upon a miserably feeble and reduced scale, with some fatal deviations from its original statutes—her splendid but transitory foundation.” Only the first step to the great changes of the present day had then been taken, when, in 1863, the University of Cambridge had allowed girls, _as an experiment_, to join the Local Examinations. Miss Buss always dated the later superiority of the teaching in her school to her experiences on that occasion. Out of eighty-four girls who went in, she sent twenty-five, of whom fifteen passed. The failure of ten in arithmetic pulled her up short, with the result that the teaching was so far changed that none failed in the next year, when girls were finally admitted on the same terms with boys, and the London Centre was formed under Miss Davies. But, even in 1866, success was so far limited, that Miss Beale could reply as follows to Lord Lyttelton’s query, “If she had heard of these new examinations?”— “There seems to be some difficulty in applying them to the higher middle classes. I think of our own case. The brothers of our pupils go to the Universities. Now, generally speaking, those who go in for the Local Examinations occupy a much lower place in the social scale, and our pupils would not like to be classed with them, but regarded as equal in rank to those who pass at the University. These feelings are stronger in small places.” The far-reaching effect of these examinations is indicated by Miss Buss’ opinion that “until the Local Cambridge Examinations were organized, there was no sort of recognition on the part of men that the feminine mind could under any circumstances rank with the masculine.” We see from this fact that, before the middle of this century, the “woman’s movement” could not be said to exist at all. The question of equality—so much to the front at present—could not then even have been formulated. It is not till 1869 that we find it taken at all seriously, in a paper in the _Macmillan_ for March of that year, by a writer who remarks that— “Two alternatives are open to the would-be reformers of woman. The first of these is the line of Miss Lydia Becker, the second of Miss Emily Davies.” And he adds that—