But are women so comfortably and happily indifferent to genius? Some have loved it to their own destruction, feeding it as oil feeds flame; and other some have fluttered about the light, singeing themselves to no great purpose, as pathetically in the way as the doomed moth. At the same time that Hazlitt accused the whole sex of this impatient disregard for inspiration, Keats found it only too devoted at the shrine. “I have met with women,” he says with frank contempt, “who I really think would like to be wedded to a poem, and given away by a novel.” At the same time that Mr. Pater said coldly that there were duties to the intellect which women but seldom understood, Sir Francis Doyle protested with humorous indignation against the frenzy for female education which filled his lecture-room with petticoats, and threatened to turn the universities of England into glorified girls’ schools. At the same time that Froude was writing, with the enviable self-confidence which was his blessed birthright, that it is the part of man to act and labor, while women are merely bound by “the negative obedience to prohibitory precepts;” or, in other words, that there is nothing in the world which they ought to do, but plenty which they ought to refrain from doing, Stevenson was insisting with all the vehemence of youth that it is precisely this contentment with prohibitory precepts, this deadening passivity of the female heart, which “narrows and damps the spirits of generous men,” so that in marriage a man becomes slack and selfish, “and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.” Which is precisely the lesson thundered at us very unpleasantly by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in “The Gadsbys.” “You may carve it on his tombstone, you may cut it on his card, That a young man married is a young man marred.” Now I wonder if the peasant and his donkey were in harder straits than the poor woman, who has stepped down the centuries under this disheartening, because inevitable condemnation. Always either too new or too old, too intelligent or too stupid, too restless after what concerns her not, or too passively content with narrow aims and outlooks, she is sure to be in the wrong whether she mounts her ass or leads him. Has the satire now directed against the higher education of women--a tiresome phrase reiterated for the most part without meaning--any flavor of novelty, save for those who know no satirists older than the contributors to “Punch” and “Life”? It is just as new as the new woman who provokes it, just as familiar in the annals of society. Take as a modern specimen that pleasant verse from Owen Seaman’s “Horace at Cambridge,” which describes gracefully and with good temper the rush of young Englishwomen to the University Extension lectures.