In Lord Burleigh’s _Precepts to his Son for the Well-Ordering of a Mans Life_, occurs the direction, ‘Thou wilt find to thy great grief there is nothing more fulsome than a she-fool.’ It is an axiom almost as pregnant of meaning as its author’s famous nod, and seems to suggest as possible that the proverbial harmony of the Jewish domestic circle may be in a measure due to its comparative immunity from she-fools. The women of Israel, _pur sang_, it is certain, are rarely noisy or assertive, and have at all times been more ready to realise their responsibilities than their ‘rights.’ In their woman’s kingdom, comprehending its limits and not wasting its opportunities, they have been content to reign and not to govern, and neither exceptional power nor exceptional intellect have affected this position. The pretty young Queen of Persia, we read, for all her new dignities, ‘did the commandment of Mordecai as when she was brought up with him,’ and Miriam with her timbrel and Deborah under her palm-tree might have been unconscious illustrative anachronisms of a very profound saying, so well content were they to ‘make their country’s songs’ and to leave it to Moses to ‘make the laws.’ The one-man rule has been always fully and freely acknowledged in Israel, and in the ideal sketch as in the real portraits of its womankind, her ‘husband,’ her ‘children,’ her ‘clothing,’ and the ‘ways of her household’ are supreme features. ‘To do a man,’ one man, ‘good and not evil all the days of his life,’ may seem to modern maidens a somewhat limited ambition, but it is just to remember that to this typical woman comes full permission to indulge in her ‘own works’ and encouragement ‘to speak with merchants from afar,’ a habit this, one ventures to think, which would open up even to Girton and Newnham graduates extended powers of conversation and correspondence in their own and foreign languages. And, withal, that pretty saying of an elderly and prosaic Rabbi, ‘I do not call my wife, wife, but home,’ has poetry and practicality too, to recommend it. For in so far as there is truth in the dictum, that ‘men will be always what women please, that if we want men to be great and good, we must teach women what greatness and goodness are,’ there really seems a good deal to be said for the old-fashioned type we have been considering, and certainly some comfort to be found in the fact that against the _ewig weibliche_ time itself is powerless. Realities may shift and vary, but ideals for the most part stand fast, and thus, despite all superficial differences, in essentials the situation is unchanged between those daughters of the desert and our daughters of to-day. Now, as then, the claim is allowed to a rightful ‘possession among their brethren.’ Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press FOOTNOTES: [1] Talmud, Yoma 356.