consequently not inured to the sound of his own voice--be called on suddenly to return thanks at a wedding-breakfast, he will, nine times out of ten, stutter and hum-and-haw, and, after putting every one on thorns, will end by making some extraordinarily _malapropos_ joke, like the celebrated one of Lord Feenix in _Dombey and Son_. Or, if he be aware overnight that he will be called on to address his own tenants on the morrow, his slumbers will be considerably less sound than if he had been warned he must go out and fight a duel at sixteen paces. As to an Englishman taking kindly to public speaking when advanced in life, so miraculous an event, I believe, is scarcely on record. Nearly the contrary of all this holds true as regards women. Those among them who are willing to speak in public seem to be carried away the moment they begin by feelings which leave little room for self-reflection, whatever pangs of shyness and diffidence they may have endured beforehand.[34] But is it not very superfluous to expatiate on the special gifts of speech assigned by nature to womankind, since in all ages their proneness to over-exert them has been the theme of jest and satire, and at no very remote date hostelries were adorned by the sign of the “Good Woman,” meaning a woman with no tongue; penal laws were in force against the creature (now happily classified among the Extinct Mammalia), the Common Scold; and even tombstones were enlivened by a sort of dig at the sleeper beneath, as in the case of the celebrated Arabella Young, whose death is specified as the date when she “began to hold her tongue”? Perhaps it is not unjust to entertain the suspicion that masculine wit may sometimes have proved rather tardy in parrying the thrusts of that “little member,” which we all know is sharpened in so terrible a furnace, and that the ponderous sarcasms recorded against its misuse may be likened to the boulder-stones thrown by Polyphemus after the retreating and exultant Greeks. Joke or no joke, it is quite certain that women are even exceptionally endowed with several, if not all, of the qualities necessary to oratory. The originality and depth of their ideas and the culture they have received may in many cases be open questions; but there can be no doubt at all that, when they have got the ideas, they will find out remarkably well how to express them. It is time now to pass to the graver part of our subject,--the value which may attach to women’s thoughts about Religion; for, if that value be trifling, it will be all the more unfortunate, should they possess any facilities for imposing them upon us by wordy fluency,--that “fatal fluency” which the best men in America have deplored as among the gifts of their countrymen.