Hannah More’s influence does not seem to have been very lasting. Her contemptuous remark, that we might as well talk about the rights of children as the rights of women, shows that she had not much real grasp of the educational problem. Both should, in her opinion, be relegated to their proper subordinate places. She was right in despising the frivolity of her day, and condemning the constant round of pleasure in which fashionable women spent their lives, but she was almost too severe to be helpful. Far more valuable was Miss Edgeworth’s work, which was constructive as well as critical. Her educational romances, in which she contrasts the good and bad governess, the sensible and frivolous girl, are thoroughly readable even at the present day, and must have proved useful to many readers who lighted unawares on the powder in the jam. _Practical Education_, written in conjunction with her father, throws valuable light on contemporary conditions, and advances theories that are still worthy of our notice. The ‘practical toy shop,’ provided with all manner of carpenter’s tools, with wood properly prepared for the young workman, and with screws, nails, glue, emery-paper, etc., is still to seek; her remarks on the two schools, the one teaching ‘by dint of reiterated pain and terror,’ the other ‘with the help of counters and coaxing and gingerbread,’ are not altogether out of date. Nor have we yet learned to pay a good governess £300 a year, on the ground that her working days are few, and she ought to lay by for a comfortable old age. Her severest strictures, like Hannah More’s, are reserved for ‘female accomplishments.’ Their chief use is that ‘they are supposed to increase a young lady’s chance of a prize in the matrimonial lottery.’ Hence, when the end is achieved, they are thrown aside. ‘As soon as a young lady is married, does she not frequently discover that she really has no leisure to cultivate talents which take up so much time?’ Nor is it quite certain that they are as efficacious as is generally supposed. The market is becoming overstocked, for ‘every young lady, and every young woman is now a young lady, has some pretension to accomplishments. She draws a little; or she plays a little; or she speaks French a little.’ Accomplishments are becoming so general ‘that they cannot be considered as the distinguishing characteristics of even a gentlewoman’s education.’ Since they are no longer ‘exclusive,’ she hopes they may be cast aside for something better. Her indictment against the female education of her day is that ‘sentiment and ridicule have conspired to represent reason, knowledge, and science as unsuitable and dangerous to women; yet, at the same time, wit and superficial acquirements in literature have been the object of admiration in society; so that this dangerous inference has been drawn, almost without our perceiving its fallacy, that superficial knowledge is more desirable in women than