In letters and memoirs not originally designed for publication, next to that in the field of romance and the novel, occasionally also in the lyric, the feminine character has found thus far its fullest and finest expression. In all these fields women have produced works which have been placed by men, not it is true beside the _greatest_ works of masculine genius in the same domain, yet beside eminent works of men. As intermediary of the works of others, woman has not in our time, as in the period of enlightenment or in the circle of Goethe, her greatest significance through conversations and letters but through the printing-press. The modern woman, however, as essayist and biographer, as translator and collector, is a valuable intermediary of culture. She is also unfortunately a menace to culture, not so much because of the inferior works which she produces, for these, like the similar works of men, soon sink into oblivion. The real danger lies in the fact that women in great multitudes increase the number of those journalists who lack intellectual as well as ethical culture, which should be an imperative condition in that field of work. But this profession is now, on the contrary, the one into which the amateur may most easily force an entrance without special training and without professional reputation. The result is that men and women who lack both can pull down, in their journals, the real work and essential character of serious people, without the remotest conception or the faintest comprehension of either. On the other hand these cliques of coffee-house people crown one another as kings and queens—for a day! The press-breed carries on in leaflets its flirtation as well as its vengeance. The knife which the child of nature thrusts into a rival’s breast is now transformed into the pen with which the reviewer stabs a competitor’s latest work. In a word women now furnish to the Press work, occasionally excellent, frequently mediocre, all too often worthless. Their womanly characteristics make it feasible more frequently for them than for men to adopt more completely the rituals of the temple service of the deity of the Press—the Public. This “womanliness” evinces itself, especially, in the ability “to grip the fleeting moment by its fluttering locks” and also to anticipate when that moment’s locks are false and so the grasp prove profitless.