This chapter, I fear, has rather belied its title. We must hark back to the Englishwoman. Let me make her amends by asserting that if she pleases she may have as fine a mind as any woman breathing. She has a naturally quick intelligence, if she be careful not to let its keenness rust; she has been dowered with common sense and power of imagination in inverse proportions; in practical matters she has a sure glance for the best course to be taken, but her vision is hazy where principles are concerned. Her critical standards are usually as conventional as her standards of conduct, but she can be strikingly original in action and will stand up nobly for her convictions. Where she attains to a measure of intellectual superiority, except at the highest levels, she is apt to lose her balance, becoming either priggish and cold or luxuriously vague and mystical. The blue stocking is not typical, but she is English and she still exists. There was an awful Miss Benger who invited Charles Lamb and his sister to tea, macaroons and intellectual conversation, as Charles pathetically describes her in his letter to Coleridge: “From thence she passed into the subject of poetry; where I, who had hitherto sat mute, and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson’s time.... I here ventured to question the fact, and was beginning to appeal to names, but I was assured ‘it certainly was the case’.”