quietly placed in their hands, and can receive it with dignity. In free, unprejudiced, chivalric England, where the race is given to the swift, the battle to the strong, without fear or favour, it is only by slow, laborious degrees that women are winning the right to enter the list at all, and are then received with half-contemptuous indulgence." Whether or not women artists have a real grievance against the Royal Academy, certain it is that the last half of the nineteenth century has been notable for the progress of women in art. It was in the galleries of the Society of Lady Artists, which came into existence in 1859, that Lady Butler first exhibited and pictures by Rosa Bonheur were displayed. With the multiplicity of art schools and every facility for obtaining instructions under the most favorable conditions, women have been brought into prominence as artists. Landscape, portrait painting, oil, water-colors, pastel--the whole range of subjects and styles of painting includes pictures of merit by women. In many of the lesser branches of art, hundreds of women have found congenial vocations. They have shown excellent taste and aptitude in china painting and other forms of decorative work--in book illustration, as designers of carpet and wall-paper patterns, as preparers of advertisements, designers of calendars, and a host of other minor art industries. Women as musical composers had appeared in the last half of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Beardman, who made her début as a singer at the Gloucester festival in 1790, was equally gifted as composer, singer, and pianist. Ann Mounsey displayed early talent, and her precocity brought her into notice when she was but nine years of age. In her maturity, her compositions gave her high rank among female composers, and in 1855 her oratorio _The Nativity_ was produced in London. She was a member of the Philharmonic Society and also of the Royal Society of Musicians. Another gifted woman, whose talents brought her early into notice and who was a member of the Royal Academy of Music, was Kate Fanny Loder. She had been instructed in piano-forte by Mrs. Lucy Anderson, teacher to Queen Victoria when she was princess and afterward to the children of her majesty. Miss Loder was a king's scholar at the Royal Academy, and when but eighteen years of age was appointed professor of harmony at her _alma mater_. Eliza Flower--whose sister, Mrs. Adams, wrote the words of the hymn _Nearer, my God, to Thee_--was another of the gifted composers of the century, and her name appears as the author of many hymn tunes.