Further, outside the region of sentiment, and even in the intellectual way, so far as it concerns social influence, a woman has special facilities. If she have extensive knowledge (and I am presuming she will have acquired a good deal before entering the ministry), it will generally be more _ready to hand_ than that of a man. Her humor, if she possesses a grain of that precious quality, will have the great advantage, in all wordy skirmishing, of being playful, quick as lightning, and always at command,--not like the ponderous satire which takes an hour to get out of its sheath, or the peculiarly masculine type of wit which the owner-- “Beareth not about, As if afraid to use it out, Except on holidays or so, As men their best apparel do.” Her logic--if by happy circumstance she has really trained her mind to work logically--will not lose the famous feminine faculty for springing to the top of the stairs while the man is steadily walking up the steps, because she has acquired the power of recognizing whether she be on the right landing or the wrong. Regarding the rhetorical faculties of women, I may first remark that, by a well-known law of acoustics, a female voice will, if equally strong, reach further and be audible more clearly at a distance than that of a man; and, for some kinds of eloquence, at all events, its softer and purer tones will probably find their way most easily to the heart. What her actual powers of oratory may be is one of the problems of the future; but the experience of feminine public speaking during the last few years seems to point to a curious but not inexplicable fact,--namely, that, given the same _ideas_, a woman will generally _express_ them more easily than a man, at least than an Englishman. This gift of facile and appropriate expression is obviously one dependent on a special faculty of the brain (the loss of which constitutes _aphasia_), and is very variously distributed among races, and also, I think, between the sexes. Oratory, which is dependent upon it for its machinery, as a pianist on his fingering, is proverbially rare among men of our nation, though, when it does exist, it seems to reach sometimes to the climax of power and grandeur. English_women_, on the contrary (so far as we yet may guess), possess more often the ready-wordedness, the fluency and _verve_ of speech, of the Celt or the Italian. Either the feminine nervous temperament is favorable to this faculty, or (as I would rather imagine to be the case) the root of the difference lies in the region of sentiment, and women speak more fluently because they are more apt to be carried away by interest in their subject or sympathy with their audience. The dread of making himself ridiculous by stammering, by talking injudiciously, or making a mistake of any kind, is so deeply ingrained in the mind of the ordinary English gentleman that, if one--not a barrister or clergyman, and