Women cannot write history. It requires too great solidity, and too minute research for their quick intellects. They write, instead, delightful memoirs. Who, but an antiquary or historical commentator, had not rather read Lucy Hutchinson’s Life of her Husband, than any of the professed histories of the Commonwealth—and exchange Lady Fanshawe for the other royalist biographers. Neither are women to turn politicians or orators. We hope never to hear of a female Burke; she would be an overbearing termagant. A spice of a talent for scolding, is the highest form of eloquence we can conscientiously allow the ladies. Criticism is for men; when women assume it, they write scandal. The current notion of criticism with most, is that of libelous abuse. From all such, Heaven defend us. Women feel more than they think, and (sometimes) say more than do. They are consequently better adapted to describe sentiments, than to speculate on causes and effects. They are more at home in their letters, than in tracts of political economy. The proper faculties in women to cultivate most assiduously are, the taste and the religious sentiment; the first, as the leading trait of the intellectual; and the last, as the governing power of the moral constitution. Give a woman a pure taste and high principles, and she is safe from the arts of the wiliest libertine. Let her have all other gifts but these, and she is comparatively defenceless. Taste purifies the heart as well as the head, and religion strengthens both. The strongest propensities to pleasure are not so often the means of disgrace and ruin, as the carelessness of ignorant virtue, and an unenlightened moral sense. This makes all the difference in the world, between the daughter of a poor countryman, and the child of an educated gentleman. Both have the same desires, but how differently directed and controlled. Yet we find nineteen lapses from virtue in the one case, where we find one in the other. Believing that what does not interest, does not benefit the mind, we would avoid all pedantic lectures to women, on all subjects to which they discover any aversion. Study should be made a pleasure, and reading pure recreation. In a general sense, we would say the best works for female readers are those that tend to form the highest domestic character. Works of the highest imagination, as being above that condition, and scientific authors, who address a different class of faculties, are both unsuitable. An admirable wife may not relish the sublimity of Milton or Hamlet; and a charming companion be ignorant of the existence of such a science as Algebra. A superficial acquaintance with the elements of the physical sciences, is worse than total unacquaintance with them.