or slinging her heavy bundle over his shoulder on a stick. The dear remembrance, sustained by all the sweet and delicate courtesies of his private life, has always lain side by side in our mind with that exquisite Essay of Elia to which he first directed our attention, in which a noble reverence to woman is inculcated, and we are taught to judge every man's respect for the sex by his demeanor towards its humblest representative. Yet, if Judge Cranch never swerved from his gracious dignity, Charles Lamb did. Woman had not gained, in his lifetime, such a hold upon her intellectual rights, that a dinner company dared chide him, when he said of Letitia Landon, "If she belonged to me, I would lock her up, and feed her on bread and water, till she gave up writing poetry. A female poet, or female author of any kind, ranks below an actress, _I_ think." We do not quote these words so much against Lamb himself,--for the lips of Mary Lamb's brother must have been thick with wine, when, with "stammering, insufficient sound," he included her in so sweeping a reprobation,--but to indicate the nature of that public opinion which is even now dwarfing the ideals of the best men; to show how little reliance is to be placed on the standard of the most generous, when a remark like this, uttered in a large literary circle, passes without criticism, and is recorded without conscious mortification,--recorded, too, by the father of that Coventry Patmore, who has known how to offer us, in later times, sugar-plums of his own _coloring_--let us add of his own _poisoning_ also--under the alluring names of "betrothals" and "espousals." How far the _facts_ are from the ideal standard, Mrs. Jameson, in a lecture lately delivered, will help us to show. "With all our schools," she says, "of all denominations, it remains an astounding fact, that _one-half_ of the women who annually become _wives_, in this England of ours, cannot sign their names in the parish register; and that this amount of ignorance in the lower classes is accompanied with an amount of ill-health, despondency, inaptitude, and uselessness in the so-called educated classes, which, taken together, prove that our boasted appliances are to a great extent failures." The ancient standard of Italy was very high, even in the fifteenth century, if we consider only the literary skill or mathematical culture frequently desired and attained; but Anna Maria Mozzoni may congratulate herself on having given a moral and social impetus to it, which it has never before received. Her wise, considerate, philosophical suggestions will meet the cordial welcome of all right-minded women. If followed out, they will create nobler women than Tambroni or Laura Veratti.[3]