Increase of material ease and comfort was re-shaping the course of domestic life. As household arrangements were improved, new appliances invented, and the general conditions made smoother, woman’s position changed. She was less completely occupied with the means of living, and more open to outside influences. That she invariably made a good use of her liberty is not so clear. The prosperous, well-housed citizenesses of the eighteenth century probably spent much of their spare time in idle chatter--it was a great period for gossip--and in tricking themselves out to imitate the fine ladies of whom they got glimpses at church and in the public gardens. They rose late because it was fashionable, leaving their servants to do the work that their grandmothers would have shared. There is as much lost as gained in the uprooting of social habits while the people are still unripe for changes. And the women of the eighteenth century _were_ unripe. There was more material than intellectual improvement. The literary movement hardly touched women in every-day life; the philanthropic movement had not made any headway, and as for politics, it was only the great ladies, with relatives and friends among statesmen, who concerned themselves with public affairs. Middle-class women seldom read the newspapers. It was in the coffee-houses that men learned and discussed the news of the day; they did not buy the papers and bring them home in London. In the country a weekly news-letter was handed from neighbour to neighbour, or discussed at village inns, but the women-folk usually gathered their news by hearsay, not finding much to interest them in the curiously composed, ill-printed medley that called itself a newspaper. The women of the middle classes did not keep pace with the men in enlarging their sphere of interests. Among the aristocracy women were naturally drawn more into the current of life by their connection with leading men of the time, by their intercourse with distinguished foreign visitors, by their opportunities of travel and of contact with the best thought of the day. But the women of the trading classes were removed from all these influences. Their _rôle_ was a domestic one. The education which they received was not calculated to inspire them with any idea that their minds needed enlarging. It was seldom thought that women required anything beyond a few accomplishments. In Scotland--