The tender sentiment and graceful verse of Mrs. Hemans, and the sad domestic experience of Hon. Mrs. Norton, from whose unmasked sorrows her husband could gather pecuniary return, and the sturdy, intellectual vigor of Harriet Martineau, who grappled with the problems of political economy and social ethics, and was the friend and counselor of the first statesmen of her time, could not fail to appeal, on their several lines, to women of corresponding type, if not of equal gifts of expression, on both sides of the Atlantic. So education was going on for women in other ways than in schools, which still furnished them limited supplies, both in quantity and quality. Among the voices which directly or indirectly were calling women to higher levels of intelligence and of thought, was that of the celebrated wit and divine, Sidney Smith, who proved by his claims for them, what he said of himself, “I have a passionate love for common justice and for common sense.” In the _Edinburgh Review_, of which he was one of the founders, he had a way of asking such pointed inquiries as whether the world had hitherto found any advantage in keeping half the people in ignorance, and whether, if women were better educated, men might not become better educated too; and he adds, “Just as though the care and solicitude which a mother feels for her children, depended on her ignorance of Greek and mathematics, and that she would desert her infant for a quadratic equation!” But so strong are the bonds of prejudice, that, although this was as early as 1810, abundant cause has been found down to the present day to iterate and reiterate the same arguments, and still to pierce the bubble of conceit of superior right with the arrows of wit and sarcasm. To show what the best schools open to girls were offering meantime, we quote what “one who had as good advantages in 1808 as New England then afforded,” gives as her course of study: “Music, geography, Murray’s Grammar, with Pope’s Essay on Man for a parsing book, Blair’s Rhetoric, Composition, and embroidery on satin. These were my studies and my accomplishments.” “Twenty-five years later than that,” says the aged lady once before quoted, “a considerable part of the gain I brought from a private school in Charlestown, Mass., was a knowledge of sixty lace stitches.”[3] Looking back to this period from the vantage ground of less than a century, most women of nowadays would echo the sentiment of the small boy, one of four brothers, who heard a visitor say to his mother: “What a pity one of your boys had not been a girl!” Dropping his game to take in the full significance of her words, he called out: “I’d like to know who’d ’a benn ’er! I wouldn’t ’a benn ’er; Ed wouldn’t ’a benn ’er; Joe wouldn’t ’a benn ’er, and I’d like to know who would ’a benn ’er!”