O pedants of these later days, who go on undiscerning To overload a woman's brain and cram our girls with learning, You'll make a woman half a man, the souls of parents vexing, To find that all the gentle sex this process is unsexing. Leave one or two nice girls before the sex your system smothers, Or what on earth will poor men do for sweethearts, wives, and mothers? Here we find _Punch_ reverting to his earlier attitude. Moreover, as I have shown elsewhere, in the middle 'eighties he was in a decidedly pessimistic frame of mind, and inclined, like Porson, to "damn the scheme of things in general." The dismal mood passed, and _Punch_ is himself again and obviously rejoicing in his own malice in the verses on an imaginary episode at Girton, where a breakdown in health, attributed to the excessive study of Browning, is traced to over-indulgence in chocolate creams by the members of the Browning Club. _Punch's_ claim to be regarded as an expert authority where women's colleges are concerned is seriously invalidated by his confusing the sites of Newnham and Girton and, worse still, by calling the former "Nuneham" in the same year. But he redeemed himself triumphantly in his study of "The Girton Girl" (No. IX, and by far the best, of his series of "Studies from _Mr. Punch's_ Studio") in December, 1886. I have the testimony of a distinguished Girton student of nearly twenty years later that _Punch's_ sketch remained even then a masterly dissection of the "mentality" of the Girton Girl, and reveals an inside knowledge, both of generalities and details, which no mere man could have attained. The Girton Girl of fact is carefully distinguished from the Girton Girl of superstition. The latter is fast becoming as extinct as the Dodo:-- [Sidenote: _The Girton Girl in 1886_] The modern schoolgirl is taking her place, no longer the giggling, flirting maiden of fiction, but an ascetic and hard-working young woman. Work has been her lot since the day when she stepped out of her cradle to combine education and amusement in the arrangement of alphabet bricks; and she looks back with a wistful incredulity to the time when the mystic letters, B.A., were to her nothing worse than the voice of the black sheep in the nursery rhyme. She inclines by instinct towards æstheticism in dress, affecting the limpest materials and the strangest hues, and making a compromise in the matter of collar and cuffs by wearing at neck and wrists a piece of very _écru_ lace, turned down the wrong way. Her boots are the terror of stray blackbeetles, for a course of lectures on Hygienic clothing early taught her to view with horror and distrust a slim ankle and a pointed toe. She has a scholarly touch of shortsightedness, which she corrects by free use of the tortoiseshell _pince-nez_ that dangles from her neck.