Among the English authors who were the resource of this country in way of literature, there began to be known a few women, in whom strong natural impulse had been fostered by exceptional educational opportunity until they ventured to use the pen and even to publish. This was usually done timidly, often protestingly, and one woman, afterwards distinguished, screened her talent behind her father’s name. Lady Anne Barnard, who wrote “Auld Robin Gray,” for some reason or other kept the secret of her authorship for fifty years. Mr. Edgeworth suppressed a translation which his daughter Maria had made, from the French, of a work on education “because his friend, Mr. Day, the author of ‘Sanford and Merton,’ had such a horror of female authors and their writings,” and it was published only after Mr. Day’s death. It is curious to note how large a ratio of the female writers of this time involve, in their essays or novels, some reference to the need of education for their sex. On the contrary, however, Mrs. Barbauld, herself a classical scholar and thinker, and both happy and useful through her acquirements, opposed the establishment of an academy for young ladies. She “approved a college and every motive of emulation for young men,” but thought that “young ladies ought only to have _such a general tincture of knowledge_ as to make them agreeable companions to a man of sense, and ought to gain these accomplishments in a more quiet and unobserved manner, from intercourse and conversation at home, with a father, brother, or friend. She regarded herself as peculiar, and not a rule for others.” Late in the eighteenth century, Mary Wollstonecraft issued a strong and direct appeal for a recognition of the intellectual needs and capacities of women. She shocked the world into antagonism by her opinions, and by her use of the word “rights,” as applied to her sex. Much interest was felt in the graceful letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and society found entertainment in the small talk of the heroines of Frances Burney, “Evelina,” “Cecilia,” and “Rosa Matilda.” Twenty years after the eloquent appeal had been made for “The Rights of Women,” Hannah More, in “Cœlebs in Search of a Wife,” introduced to the novel-reading world the subject of female education, with a tact and moderation which the stronger cravings of Mary Wollstonecraft did not permit. Without offensive presumption, and with deference to the superior claim of the other sex to the whole loaves, she meekly, but plainly, suggested the relish of the female mind for intellectual crumbs. The more favorable reception of her milder views, which was said “to have caused more than one dignified clergyman to take down his Eton grammar from the shelf, to initiate his daughters into the hitherto forbidden mysteries of ‘hic-hæc-hoc,’” goes to prove, by analogy, the theory of the high potency school of homœopathists, for the smaller the dose administered the greater appear to have been the results.