Sir John Doderidge, to whom my attention was directed by an eminent antiquarian, was an able lawyer, and an industrious compiler of law-books of a special kind. He was from Devonshire, and admitted as a barrister in 1603. He was successively appointed Solicitor-General, Judge of the Common Pleas and of the King's Bench. Among the works known to be his, yet not commonly included in the list of his works, are the "Lawyer's Light," published in 1629; and "The Complete Parson," with the laws relating to advowsons and livings, in 1670,--books of the same class, character, and appearance as the "Lawe's Resolution." As he died in 1628, I was at first inclined to suspect the fairness of this inference: but a further examination showed that all his publications were _posthumous_; which accounts, perhaps, for the _candor_ of their covert satire. A few particulars of his life and standing may be gained from the new Life of Lord Bacon, where Hepworth Dixon says that "the Solicitor-Generalship, vacant once more, is given, over Francis Bacon's head, to Sir John Doderidge, Serjeant of the Coif." In 1606, when Sir Francis Gawdy dies, "Coke goes up to the bench; and Doderidge, the Solicitor-General, ought, by the custom of the law, to follow Coke, leaving the post of Solicitor void: but Cecil raises Sir Henry Hobart, his obscure Attorney of the Court of Wards, over both Doderidge and Bacon's head, to the high place of Attorney-General." Since that day, Bentham and Catharine Macauley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill, have made the same complaint; sustaining it, however, by vigorous argument for woman's full emancipation, and a demand for the right of suffrage. Let us look at this English law. So far as it affects _single_ women, it is very simple. A single woman has the same rights of property as a man; that is, she may get and keep, or dispose of, whatever she can. She has a right, like man, to the protection of the law, and has to pay the same taxes to the State. "Duly qualified," she may _vote_ on parish questions and for parish officers; and "duly qualified," in England, means that she shall have a certain amount of property, and so a vested interest in the prosperity of her parish. If her parents die without a will, she shares equally with her brothers in the division of the personal property; but her eldest brother and his issue, even if female, will take the real estate as heirs-at-law. If she be an only child, she inherits both personal and real, and becomes immediately that most pitiable of creatures, an heiress.