Some kind anonymous correspondents write to console us for offensive criticism by maintaining the truth of our assertions as supported by their own experience. I remember that when the novel of "Wenderholme" was published, and naturally attacked for its dreadful portraiture of the drinking habits of a past generation, a lady wrote to me anonymously from a locality of the kind described bearing mournful witness to the veracity of the description.[33] In this case the employment of the anonymous form was justified by two considerations. There was no offensive intention, and the lady had to speak of her own relations whose names she desired to conceal. Authors frequently receive letters of gently expressed criticism or remonstrance from readers who do not give their names. The only objection to these communications, which are often interesting, is that it is rather teasing and vexatious to be deprived of the opportunity for answering them. The reader may like to see one of these gentle anonymous letters. An unmarried lady of mature age (for there appears to be no reason to doubt the veracity with which she gives a slight account of herself) has been reading one of my books and thinks me not quite just to a most respectable and by no means insignificant class in English society. She therefore takes me to task,--not at all unkindly. "DEAR SIR,--I have often wished to thank you for the intense pleasure your books have given me, especially the 'Painter's Camp in the Highlands,' the word-pictures of which reproduced the enjoyment, intense even to pain, of the Scottish scenery. "I have only now become acquainted with your 'Intellectual Life,' which has also given me great pleasure, though of another kind. Its general fairness and candor induce me to protest against your judgment of a class of women whom I am sure you underrate from not having a sufficient acquaintance with their capabilities. "'_Women who are not impelled by some masculine influence are not superior, either in knowledge or in discipline of the mind, at the age of fifty to what they were at twenty-five.... The best illustration of this is a sisterhood of three or four rich old maids.... You will observe that they invariably remain, as to their education, where they were left by their teachers many years before.... Even in what most interests them--theology, they repeat but do not extend their information._'