Strong-visaged women are often pure pumpkins with a very rough and corrugated outside. It is astonishing how soon they break down, and for all their stern and powerful looks sink under burdens under which a frail little creature, as light as thistledown, will glide along quite easily. Women with black brows and harsh voices--brigandesses by appearance, or like the typical Herodias of unimaginative artists--are often the gentlest and most pithless of their sex, and may be seen acting quite compassionately towards their infants, or vindicating their womanhood by meekly sewing on their husbands' buttons and weeping at their rebukes; while a fair, silver-tongued, languid lady, as soft as if she were made of nothing harder than the traditional cream and rose-leaves, will give up her babies as a prey to unfeeling nurses and let her husband go buttonless and in rags, while she lounges before the fire indifferent to his wrath and callous to his wrongs. There is many a house mistress who looks as if she could use her fists when annoyed, who is absolutely afraid of her servants; and the maid is always the mistress when the one is fibre and the other pulp. Heaven be praised that the strong-visaged women are not 'clear grit' all through. If they were as hard as they look, the world would go but queerly, and society would have to make new laws for the protection of its weaker male members. But nature is merciful as well as sportive, and while she amuses herself by creating pumpkins of formidable aspect, takes care that the core shall not always correspond to the rind. Like the Athenian images of the satyr which enclosed a god, the black-browed brigandesses and the men of magnificent deportment are sometimes impostors of a quite amiable kind; and when you have once learnt by heart the false analogies of form, you will cease to fear your typical Herodias, to be impressed by your copy of the Prince Regent, or to be influenced by your wordy Hegelian talking platitudes in the philosophic dialect. _WIDOWS._ There are widows and widows; there are those who are bereaved and those who are released; those who lose their support and those whose chains are broken; those who are sunk in desolation and those who wake up into freedom. Of the first we will not speak. Theirs is a sorrow too sacred to be publicly handled even with sympathy; but the second demand no such respectful reticence. The widow who is no sooner released from one husband than she plots for another, and the widow who leaps into liberty over the grave of a gaoler, not a lover, are fair game enough. They have always been favourite subjects whereon authors may exercise their wits; and while men are what they are--laughing animals apt to see the humour lying in incongruity, and with a spice of the devil to sharpen that same laughter into satire--they will remain favourite subjects, tragic as the state is when widowhood is deeper than mere outward condition.