When the most fascinating of all heroines, Di Vernon, anticipated posterity by devoting her attention to politics, field sports, and classical literature, she enumerated, among the more feminine accomplishments which she had discarded, "sewing a tucker, working cross-stitch, and making a pudding"; and she instanced, among the symbols of orthodox femininity "a shepherdess wrought in worsted, a broken-backed spinet, a lute with three strings, rock-work, shell-work, and needle-work." We clear the century with a flying leap, and find ourselves in the company of a model matron, with surroundings substantially unchanged: "Mrs. Bayham-Badger was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it." Miss Volumnia Dedlock's accomplishments, though belonging to the same period, were slightly different: "Displaying in early life a pretty talent for cutting ornaments out of coloured paper, and also singing to the guitar in the Spanish tongue and propounding French conundrums in country houses, she passed the twenty years of her existence between twenty and forty in a sufficiently agreeable manner. Lapsing then out of date, and being considered to bore mankind by her vocal performances in the Spanish language, she retired to Bath." Perhaps she had been educated by Miss Monflathers, "who was at the head of the head Boarding and Day Establishment in the town," and whose gloss on the didactic ditty of the Busy Bee so confounded the emissary from the Waxworks. "In books, or work, or healthful play is quite right as far as genteel children are concerned, and in their case 'work' means painting on velvet, fancy needle-work, or embroidery." Do even Aunts paint on velvet, or cut ornaments out of coloured paper, in this "so-called Twentieth Century"? I know no more pathetic passage in the Literature of Art than that in which Mrs. Gaskell enumerated Miss Matty's qualifications for the work of teaching:-- "I ran over her accomplishments. Once upon a time I had heard her say she could play 'Ah! vous dirai-je maman?' on the piano; but that was long, long ago; that faint shadow of musical acquirement had died out years before. She had also once been able to trace patterns very nicely for muslin embroidery, but that was her nearest approach to the accomplishment of drawing, and I did not think it would go very far. Miss Matty's eyes were failing her, and I doubted if she could discover the number of threads in a worsted-work pattern, or rightly appreciate the different shades required for Queen Adelaide's face, in the loyal wool-work now fashionable in Cranford."