ever forget my schoolmate the tall and robust Jocunda?—bubbling well of laughter and fun and good nature—who never had a bit of paper in her hand that it was not presently broad with caricature, or tender and graceful with the sweetest little flower-thoughts of babies and fairies and angels and all imaginable ethereal feminine things. But she is married! Women may never produce a Raphael.—but it if quite enough for me to look through the exquisite illustrations of "The Story without an End," by the Hon. Mrs. Boyle, an English lady, to know that women cannot be spared from the world of art,—for these designs are sui generis,—I think no man could have imagined them. Art associations among our women, painting and sketching clubs, proper notice and encouragement given to girlish talent, would eventually produce a feminine School of Art in America, as they have already done in England,—but another instance among several which ought to humiliate us, of how much American women talk, and how much English women do. Whether it is that they have indeed more genius, or that so many of their gentlewomen are obliged to support themselves, or that so many of them being unmarried, they are forced into self-development for want of occupation, I know not; but certain it is, that while the mass of English women strike Americans as tame and conventional, most of the best work of the feminine world for the last twenty years has been done by them.
For sculpture American girls seem to have an odd, independent sort of instinct, though they have not shown any strictly independent thought in it yet, that I know of. But this is inevitable. All feminine attempts in any new direction will at first be servile, if not weak, copies of the masculine models. But when women have fairly learned to use their wings, they will shape their flight for themselves, discover their own truths, draw their own conclusions, conceive their own ideals,—a proposition which I consider proven by the history of the English feminine novel, which, beginning with the gross masculine imita-
