Apart from any other claim he may have upon his generation, Mr. Meredith’s greatest and most original will ever remain his marvellous knowledge of woman. All young girls upon the verge of womanhood should be recommended an exhaustive study of him upon this subject, as a healthy antidote against the nauseous and abominable travesties of themselves and their species circulated by the libraries, in which volumes, however bad the men may be drawn, the women are ten times worse, fifty times more unnatural, and at least a hundred times more corrupting to the sane judgment. From him, instead of the current inanities in which the typical heroine of the circulating libraries is enveloped past recognition of human sisterhood (thank Heaven! for a fraternity with the monstrous doll would be a greater grievance than any we owe unkind nature), will they learn much upon their sex that will give them material for long and profound reflection. They will learn that the eggshell appearance of woman upon the boards of experience is a gross exaction, the remnant of a grosser stage in man--that the demand is the reverse of a compliment to her. Instead of that ragged aphorism (clothing of a lie), ‘that the hardest on women are women themselves,’ they will be offered a higher and juster estimate of their own natural mercy, and will hear ‘that a woman in the pillory restores the original bark of brotherhood to mankind,’ a remark to give them pause and set their brains in another direction. They will also learn, what they can never sufficiently appreciate, that ‘what a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature;’ that ‘in their judgments upon women, men are females, voices of the present sexual dilemma,’ and that in their desire to have a ‘a still woman who can make a constant society of her pins and needles,’ ‘they create by stoppage a volcano, and are amazed at its eruptiveness,’ and a word upon which we cannot too insistently weigh, a gallant word from a male pen, ‘that the motive life with women must be in the head, equally with men.’ THE END. BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.