It is worthy of record, however, and especially as running counter to the received opinion of the loquacity of the sex, that no female member was ever known to deliver or attempt to deliver a sentence on the subject in debate. Now and then, perchance, a short clearing cough would flatter us that we were going to benefit by feminine taste and delicacy of sentiment; but the expectation invariably fell to the ground, and we might as well have expected an opinion to transpire from the wax work of Mrs. Salmon or Madame Tussaud. I have since learned, it is true, from one of the maturest of the she-fellows, that she did once actually contemplate a few words to the matter in hand, but that at the very first stitch she lost her needle, by which she meant her tongue, and then in seeking for her needle she lost the thread of her ideas, and so gave up the task, she said, as not being “woman’s work.” It would seem therefore, that a set discourse in company is altogether incompatible with the innate diffidence and shrinking timidity of the sex. Milton, indeed, makes this silent modesty a peculiar characteristic of perfect womanhood, as evinced in the demeanour of “accomplished Eve.” To mark it the more strongly, he liberally endows our general mother with fluency of speech in her colloquies with Adam, so as even to “forget all time” in conversing with him; whereas in the presence of a third party,--the Angel Visitor for instance, whom she less bids than makes welcome to her dessert,--she seldom opens her lips. Nor is this an overstrained picture: the same matronly, or spinsterly reserve, having survived the Fall, and the confusion of Babel, and the more womanly of her daughters, however good at what the Scotch call “a two-handed crack,” in a corner or behind a curtain will still evince a paradisiacal hesitation, amounting to an impediment, in addressing the most limited audience. In fact up to a comparatively recent period, the Miltonic theory was practically acknowledged and acted upon, at the theatre, the female characters of the Drama being always represented by proxies of men or boys.