"By 'r lady, your ladyship is nearer heaven than when I saw
You last, by the altitude of a choppine."

If cruel, covetous, all-conquering death had not thus early snatched bustling Tom away, he would have visited China, to examine that queer people, who say

"Their backs have borne eight thousand years

The birch and the bamboo."

With one more extract from the learned Ensor, altering, or rather adding, one word, and I will finish this chapter on foreign travel.

"What principally renders the English Americans' most intelligent and liberal? They are the greatest travellers; the nature of their government effects much; but that curiosity and enterprise which sends them about in all directions, tends eminently to assure them that proud rank which they enjoy in the intellectual world. Would to God that their attention in distant nations was more directed to the substantial interests of knowledge! This is my wish; but it is my supplication that my countrymen conduct themselves abroad with marked decorum; and, according to their deportment, they not only are received well or ill, but they raise or depreciate the reputation of their country."

FEMALE EDUCATION.

"We are permitted no books but such as tend to the weakening and effeminating our minds. We are taught to place all our art in adorning our persons, while our minds are entirely neglected."

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGUE.

If ever there was a period in English history that may be said to be a test of the female character and its capabilities, it surely was the period prior to the reign of the Stuarts. For the previous two reigns the government was not a monarchy, but (as the present under Victoria) a gynarchy, which produced several excellent women; and so also did the period of the commonwealth, in which the bravery of the women equalled that of the men. If there are those who still doubt the powers of the female mind, perhaps it would be proper for them to consider whether their conduct is not dishonourable: they exclaim that women are impotent beings, yet they will scarcely admit them a tolerable education; and a literary woman is their

everlasting scorn. However, the perusal of any popular biogra phy would undeceive them.

"Look back who list unto the former ages,

And call to count what is of them become;
Where be those learned wits and antique sages

Which of all whisdome knew the perfect somme?" SPENSER.

I will give a short account of a few, to stimulate farther inquiry.

The following is an account of Lady Fanshawe, who was the wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, treasurer of the navy under Prince Rupert, and translator of the works of Louis de Camoens. She accompanied him in his embassies, and compiled memoirs of her own life, which have as yet never been published, and which is to be regretted, as they contain many interesting anecdotes of the time, told with a cheerful simplicity. "In the spring of 1649 I accompanied my husband on a voyage from Galway to Malaga: we pursued our way with prosperous winds, but a most tempestuous master, a Dutchman, (which is enough to say,) but truly I think the greatest beast I ever saw of his kind. When we had just passed the straits we saw coming toward us a Turkish galley, well manned, and we believed we should be carried away for slaves; for our man had so ladened his ship with goods for Spain, that his guns were useless, although she carried sixty. He called for brandy, and, after he and his men, who were near 200, had well drunken, he called for arms, and cleared the deck as well as he could, resolving to fight rather than lose his ship, worth £30,000. This was sad for us passengers; but my husband bid us to be sure to keep in the cabin, and not appear, which would make the Turk think we were men-of-war; but that, if they saw women, they would board us. He went up on deck, taking with him a gun and a sword. This beast of a captain had locked me up in my cabin; I knocked, and called to no purpose, until the cabin-boy came and opened the door. I, all in tears, desired him to give me his thrum cap and tarred coat, which he did; I gave him half a crown, and, flinging away my night-clothes, put them on: I crept softly on deck, and stood by my husband's side, as free from sickness and fear as, I confess, I was from discretion; but it was the effect of that passionate love for him which I could never master. By this time the two vessels were engaged in close parley, and so well satisfied with each other's force, that the Turk's man-of-war tacked about, and we continued our course. But when your father saw it convenient to retreat, looking upon me, he blessed himself, and snatched me up in his arms, saying, "Good God! that love can make this change!' and, though he

seemingly chid me, he would laugh at it as often as he remembered the voyage.'

Sir Richard adhered to the royal interest, and was engaged in the battle of Worcester, where he was taken prisoner: he was confined at Whitehall until a dangerous sickness, that threatened his life, procured his enlargement on bail. "During the time of his imprisonment," Lady Fanshawe says, "I failed not, when the clock struck four in the morning, to go with a dark lantern in my hand, all alone, and on foot, to Whitehall, by the entry that went out of King's-street into the bowling green; there I would go under his window and call him softly. He, excepting the first time, never failed to put out his head at the first call; thus we talked together, and sometimes I was quite wet through with rain."

This affectionate lady accompanied her husband when ambassador from Charles II. to the court of Spain; but in 1666 he was recalled. This recall is said to have broken his heart.

"In trouble to be troubled

Is to have our sorrows doubled." SPANISH PROVERB.

but

Oh! ye who love sincerity and truth, read the following. It is calculated" to revive the heart of any one, even were he sinking under the very ribs of death." "On the 15th of June my husband was taken very sick with a disorder like the ague, it turned to a malignant inward fever, of which he languished until the 26th, and then departed this life. The queen-mother of Spain invited me to stay with my children at court, promising me a pension of a thousand ducats a year providing I would embrace the Roman Catholic religion. This I declined, and was thus left with five children, a distressed family, the temptation to change my religion, the want of all friends, without counsel, out of my own country, and without any means of returning with my wretched family to it."

This excellent lady, whose memoirs were intended for the instruction of her son, in speaking of her husband, says: "Our aims and designs were one; our loves one; our resentments one; we so studied one the other, that we knew each other's mind by our looks."

"Thrice happy they whose hearts are tied

In love's mysterious knot so close

No strife, no quarrels can divide,

And only death, fell death, can loose." HORACE.

This excellent lady is fully described in the following lines:

"A perfect woman, nobly plann'd

To warn, to comfort, and command;

And yet a spirit still and bright,

With something of an angel light." WORDSWORTH,

There was Anne Killigrew, according to Wood, "A grace for beauty and a muse for wit." As a classical scholar, she was a match for many of the scavans of the day.

There was also Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, “who was a great builder, a buyer and seller of estates, a moneylender, a farmeresse, a merchant of lead, coals, and timber."* Doubtless she had male assistants, but she, with great acuteness and with the usual penetration of her sex, superintended them.

There was the celebrated Countess of Derby, who defended Latham House for two years against the parliamentary forces, until it was battered down about her ears. "The bravest fall, but only cowards yield." A bomb-shell burst in the room where her and her family were taking their meal, on which she immediately ordered her defenders to make a sally, which drove the assailants from their trenches, and took the mortar. She returned an answer by a flag of truce, soliciting a surrender, that she would hang the next that came upon the same errand. She encouraged her faithful defenders to remain by her, saying:

"Like the dwarf oak upon the desert plain,

We'll mock the tempest as it brays around us,
And bid defiance to the blast that rends us."

The heroic Countess of Cumberland had the Castle of Appleby fortified, and the command given to her neighbour, Sir Phillip Musgrave, against Cromwell. When Sir Joseph Williamson, secretary of state, nominated a candidate for her borough of Appleby, she sent him word, "I have been bullied by a usurper, slighted by the court, but I will not be dictated to by a subject: your man shan't stand."

The mother and maids of George Abbot, with eight men, defended Caldecot Hall, in Warwickshire, successfully in 1642, against Prince Rupert with eighteen troops of horse. All the pewter dishes and plates were melted into bullets on this occasion by the women.

In the time of the commonwealth there was a rising in the west of England under Colonels Grove, Penruddock, Hunt, and some others they were defeated, and some tried and executed. Hunt, who was the ancestor of the radical Henry Hunt, and, like him, was imprisoned in Ilchester jail, was to have been executed; but two of his sisters visited him there, and one of them (Margery) changed clothes with him, and so her brother effected his escape, which is quite as heroic a deed as was performed some years past by Madame Lavalette in France.†

* Reed.

+ Hunt's Memoirs.

"Thus true fortitude shows itself in great exploits,

That justice warrants and that reason guides."

From George Fox's journal I find he was to be tried in 1656; being on his apostolic tour, he sent for Anne Downer, from London to Launceston, in Cornwall, to take down the trial in short hand.*

It has been said that "in love, as in hatred, woman knows no measure," as is proved by the following quotation from the "Excellencies of the Female sex," by H. C. Agrippa: "When our Saviour rose from the dead he appeared first to women, not to men; and it is manifest that, after the death of Jesus Christ, the men forsook the faith, but it has never been found that the women ever abandoned the Christian religion. Our Saviour was betrayed, sold, bought, accused, condemned, suffered, was crucified, and finally given to death by no other than men. He was denounced by St. Peter, his disciple, and forsaken by all the others, and was accompanied to the cross and the sepulchre solely by the women. Women were last at the cross and first at the grave." The following extract is by Count Segur, a French author. I give it for its fairness and from its general good sense: "An Englishman, by his habits and his taste for business, has subjected his wife to solemn rules for the regulation of her conduct; and has, consequently, marked her manners by an apparent gravity. More thoughtful than communicative, especially with women, there is established between himself and his wife a contract, rather of power than of tenderness, of submission than of confidence, of concealed passion than of sympathy, of sentiment than a unison of opinion. To form the mind and heart of woman ought, according to my opinion, to be almost the sole aim of education. The heart of females is the guardian of their character, and their mind that of their conduct. The education of men embraces many objects. But when a woman is mild, polished, and gifted with sensibility, at the same time that her mind has received the necessary degree of cultivation to render her company and conversation entertaining and agreeable, what more can be desired ?"

Lavater writes: "A woman, whose ruling passion is not vanity, is superior to any man of equal qualities."+

The following stanzas, by the Poet Drayton, a countryman and cotemporary with Shakspeare, will give some idea of the education and qualifications of a knight's daughter :

To show the state of morals at that time, he said the sheriff told him there were only thirty people at the sessions for bastardy; which, considering the small population of the county, was a very great number. + Aphorism, 440.