_Mr. Fax._ Your remark is not totally just: for though custom, how justly I will not say, banishes women from the fields of classical literature, yet the study of Italian poetry, of which you think so highly, is very much encouraged among them. _Mr. Forester._ You should rather say it is not discouraged. They are permitted to know it: but in very few instances is the permission accompanied by any practical aid. The only points practically enforced in female education are sound, colour, and form,—music, dress, drawing, and dancing. The mind is left to take care of itself. _Mr. Fax._ And has as much chance of doing so as a horse in a pound, circumscribed in the narrowest limits, and studiously deprived of nourishment. _Anthelia._ The simile is, I fear, too just. To think is one of the most unpardonable errors a woman can commit in the eyes of society. In our sex a taste for intellectual pleasures is almost equivalent to taking the veil; and though not absolutely a vow of perpetual celibacy, it has almost always the same practical tendency. In that universal system of superficial education which so studiously depresses the mind of women, a female who aspires to mental improvement will scarcely find in her own sex a congenial associate; and the other will regard her as an intruder on its prescriptive authority, its legitimate and divine right over the dominion of thought and reason: and the general consequence is, that she remains insulated between both, in more than cloistered loneliness. Even in its effect on herself, the ideal beauty which she studies will make her fastidious, too fastidious, perhaps, to the world of realities, and deprive her of the happiness that might be her portion, by fixing her imagination on chimaeras of unattainable excellence. _Mr. Forester._ I can answer for men, Miss Melincourt, that there are some, many I hope, who can appreciate justly that most heavenly of earthly things, an enlightened female mind; whatever may be thought by the pedantry that envies, the foppery that fears, the folly that ridicules, or the wilful blindness that will not see its loveliness. I am afraid your last observation approaches most nearly to the truth, and that it is owing more to their own fastidiousness than to the want of friends and admirers, that intelligent women are so often alone in the world. But were it otherwise, the objection will not apply to Italian poetry, a field of luxuriant beauty, from which women are not interdicted even by the most intolerant prejudice of masculine usurpation. _Anthelia._ They are not interdicted, certainly; but they are seldom encouraged to enter it. Perhaps it is feared, that, having gone thus far, they might be tempted to go farther: that the friend of Tasso might aspire to the acquaintance of Virgil, or even to an introduction to Homer and Sophocles.