You've dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You've never turned the wrong to right—
You've been a coward in the fight!'[1]
But it is perhaps time that I should drop the masculine personal pronoun for the feminine, and, being a woman, treat of the Life Literary from the woman's point of view. In olden days the profession of literature was looked upon as a terrible thing for a woman to engage in, and the observations of some very kindly and chivalrous writers on this subject are not without pathos. To quote one example only, can anything be more quaintly droll at this time of day than the following:—
"Of all the sorrows in which the female character may participate there are few more affecting than those of an Authoress—often insulated and unprotected in society—with all the sensibility of the sex, encountering miseries which break the spirits of men!"
This delicate expression of sympathy for a woman's literary struggles was written by the elder Disraeli as late as 1840. Truly we have raced along the rails of progress since then at express speed—and the "affecting" sorrows of an "Authoress" (with a capital A) now affect nobody except in so far as they make "copy" for the callow journalist to hang a string of cheap sneers upon. The Authoress must take part with the Author in the general rough-and-tumble of life—and she cannot too quickly learn the truth that when once she enters the literary arena, where men are already fisticuffing and elbowing each other remorselessly, she will be met chiefly with
- ↑ The late Charles Mackay, LL.D.
