The name of woman will ever be glorious so long as it is synonymous with beauty, tenderness, sweetness, devotion, all the sacred troop of virtues; it will be glorious, thanks to the Lucretias, the Penelopes, the Cornelias, ancient and modern, to the devoted daughters, the loving wives, the adorable mothers, to the thousands of obscure heroines who remind us, in the words of the poet of Antiquity, that the most virtuous women have been those whom the world has heard least of. * * * * * A witty French lady, who has also the talent of being pretty and very amiable, reminded me the other day that Madame de Girardin had said, that out of a hundred women, you would find but two stupid ones. If England possessed, or had ever had a Madame de Girardin, we might possibly read in some book, that out of a hundred English women, you will find two witty. But this does not prevent John Bull from getting on in the world. Very much the contrary: England made all her great conquests at a time when her women were treated with about as much consideration as the inmates of an Eastern harem, and it is to this masculine independence, this indifference towards women, that the success of the English may partly be ascribed. Our mothers in France are matchless; but they tie us to their apron-strings too much: they make us more supple and more amiable, but they enervate us. From our mother's yoke we pass, after a short liberty, more or less capable of improving us, to that of our wives. I will repeat it, cry it upon the house-tops: from the cradle to the tomb we allow ourselves to be led like lambs by women. The chains are charming, the servitude is of the sweetest! that I do not wish to deny; but servitude it is none the less; and if we are to go and found colonies, empires, in Africa, China, and I don't know where else, we must have pioneers, and it is not the fine young fellows, of whom the mothers of the present day are so proud and so careful, that will go and transplant our civilisation outside our dear fair country. The Englishman leaves his mother without more emotion or more ceremony than we should show in taking leave of our landlord. If he be married, he announces to his wife that he has decided to set out next week for Australia. She gets his trunks packed, an operation less lengthy in England than in France, and off they go. In our country, a woman follows her husband by law; here she follows him by instinct. In France, woman is a dream; in England she is a necessity, a habit. Condé and Turenne were led by women; Wellington and Nelson ill-treated their wives. Corneille's heroines are Roman women, with hearts of gold, and wills of iron, full of sublime devotion. Shakespeare's heroines are, for the most part, slaves or simpletons: Juliet is a spoilt child, Desdemona a kind of submissive odalisque, Beatrice a pretty prattle, and Ophelia a goose.