[Illustration: MODERN ÆSTHETICS MATERFAMILIAS: "Where have you been all the morning, girls?" SOPHRONIA CASSANDRA: "We've been practising old Greek attitudes at lawn-tennis, mamma!" PAPA (_who is not æsthetic_): "Ah! hope you like it, I'm sure!" SOPHRONIA CASSANDRA: "Very much, papa--only we _never hit the ball_!"] _Punch_ was already a convert to the higher education of women within certain limits. His reservations are shown in 1875 in an interview between Professor _Punch_ and an ideal candidate for the Ladies' University as it should be. Domestic economy comes first in the curriculum, the humanities second. A picture in the following year would seem to indicate that _Punch's_ ideal was inverted, for one Girton student is shown reading to another a valentine headed with the famous lines from the _Antigone_ of Sophocles beginning [Greek: Erôs anikate machan].[3] "How much jollier," she observes, "than those silly English verses fellows used to send!" Classics were still the predominant partner, and in 1878 _Punch_ notes and resents the attempted revival of classical costume inaugurated by a fashionable poetess. 'Arry's tirade against the higher education of women in 1879, blaspheming against the whole movement as ridiculous and unnatural, is heavily ironical, for in the same year _Punch_ has some friendly verses on the extension of Girton and Newnham, and in 1880 congratulates Miss Scott on being bracketed eighth Wrangler. _Punch_ simultaneously congratulated Mrs., afterwards Lady Butler, on being elected an A.R.A., and rejoiced that the doors of the Academy had been reopened to the sex once honoured in the days of Sir Joshua:-- Mrs. Butler, née Elizabeth Thompson, _Punch_ takes off his hat to you as the first Lady Associate. Your predecessors, Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, sprang into being full-blown R.A.'s. This is as it should be. At last _Punch_ may say, and with pride he says it, the Ladies are looking up--looking up to the high places of Science and Art, which should never have been held beyond their reach, and which will be graced by their occupancy. But when the Academy doors are reopened to the Ladies, let them be opened to their full width. Let us not hear of any petty restrictions or exclusions from this or that function or privilege of R.A. What these letters bring men let them bring to women. _Punch's_ congratulations were premature. Forty years have elapsed, and no women have yet been elected Associates. [Footnote 3: The quotation reminds me that, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford at this time, the handmaiden at a certain lodgings was called "Annie Katie" by successive generations of undergraduates. These were not her baptismal names: they had been bestowed upon her by an ingenious scholar because her surname was Macan.] [Sidenote: _A Song of Degrees_]