Is there, then, anything new? The jests of all journalism, English, French, and American, anent the mannishness of the modern woman’s dress? Surely, in these days of bicycles and outdoor sports, this at least is a fresh satiric development. But a hundred and seventy-five years ago just such a piece of banter was leveled at the head of the then new and mannish woman, who, riding through the country, asks a tenant of Sir Roger de Coverley if the house near at hand be Coverley Hall. The rustic, with his eyes fixed on the cocked hat, periwig, and laced riding-coat of his questioner, answers confidently, “Yes, sir.” “And is Sir Roger a married man?” queries the well-pleased dame. But by this time the bumpkin’s gaze has traveled slowly downwards, and he sees with dismay that this strange apparition finishes, mermaid-fashion, in a riding-skirt. Horrified at his mistake, he falters out, “No, madam,” and takes refuge from embarrassment in flight. Turn the horse into a wheel, the long skirt into a short one, or into no skirt at all, and we have here all the material needed for the ever-recurring joke presented to us so monotonously to-day. The belligerent sex, Mr. Lang has called us, and we are not stouter fighters now than we have been through all the centuries, albeit the methods of warfare have changed somewhat, and changed perchance for ill. It is pleasant to think that in the days when muscle was better than mind (which days, thanks to our colleges, are fast returning to us), and the sword was very much mightier than the pen, women held their own as easily as they do now. Not only through the emotions they inspired, as when the fair Countess of Salisbury, beautiful, courageous, and chaste, heartened the little garrison besieged at Warwick, so that, as it is quaintly chronicled, “every man was made as valiant as two men, by reason of her kind and loving words.” Not only through the loyalty they evoked, as when the heroic Countess of Montford defended her husband’s cause through twelve years of well-nigh hopeless struggle, until, by her invincible bravery and determination, she placed her unheroic son upon the ducal chair of Brittany. Not only through their astuteness in diplomacy, as when the crafty Duchess of Brabant, “a lady,” says Froissart, “of a very active mind,” duped England, cajoled France, and united the great houses of Burgundy and Hainault in a double marriage, overcoming the well-nigh insuperable obstacles by her woman’s wit and her resistless resolution. But when it came to downright fighting, these hardy dames were not much behind their husbands and brothers in the field. In that sharp warfare which the Black Prince carried into the heart of Spain, it chanced that Sir Thomas Trivet at the head of an English force laid siege to the Castilian town of Alaro. Its garrison made a rash sortie, were trapped in an ambuscade, and nearly every man was slain or taken prisoner.