As for her accomplishments, they comprised, apart from the knowledge of a few pieces on the guitar and the piano, some slight power of sketching or flower-painting in water-colours. Of course it was nothing better than the amusement of an amateur. As for attempting literature, no one, with very few exceptions, ever thought of it. There was then but a limited demand for women’s literary work--a very limited demand--yet there had already been some very fine work done by women. Mrs. Ellis was writing those famous and immortal works of hers on the _Women of England_, the _Mothers of England_, the _Wives of England_, the _Daughters of England_,--so far as I know, for the subject is inexhaustible, the _Housemaids of England_. These essays, which I fear, dear reader, you have never seen, endeavoured to mould woman on the theory of recognised intellectual inferiority to man. She was considered beneath him in intellect as in physical strength; she was exhorted to defer to man, to acknowledge his superiority--not to show herself anxious to combat his opinions. At this very time, one woman at least--Harriet Martineau--was proving to the world that there were exceptions to the inferiority of the sex in matters of reason; while another woman--Marian Evans--already grown up, was shortly to enter the field with another illustration of the same remarkable fact. It has been often charged against Thackeray that his good women were insipid. Thackeray, like most artists, could only draw the women of his own time, and at that time they were undoubtedly insipid. Men, I suppose, liked them so. To be childishly ignorant; to carry shrinking modesty so far as to find the point of a shoe projecting beyond the folds of a frock indelicate; to confess that serious subjects were beyond a woman’s grasp; never even to pretend to form an independent judgment; to know nothing of Art, History, Science, Literature, Politics, Sociology, Manners;--men liked these things; women yielded to please the men; her very ignorance formed a subject of laudable pride with the Englishwoman of the Forties. [Illustration: _Painting by Winterhalter_ “FIRST MAY 1851” THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON PRESENTING A BIRTHDAY GIFT TO HIS GODSON, PRINCE ARTHUR]