Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/75

ment which, in one form or another, prevailed throughout the last century, and lapped over into the middle of our own. Miss Mitford is merely echoing, with cheerful humor, the opinions of the very clever and distinguished men whom it was her good fortune to know, and who were all the more generous to her and to her sister toilers, because it did not occur to them for a moment that women claimed, or were ever going to claim, a serious place by their sides. There is nothing clearer, in reading the courteous and often flattering estimate of woman's work which the critics of fifty years ago delighted in giving to the world, than the under-current of amusement that such things should be going on. Christopher North, who has only censure and contempt for the really great poets of his day, is pleased to lavish kind words on Mrs. Hemans and Joanna Baillie, praising them as adults occasionally praise clever and good children. That neither he nor his boon companions of the "Noctes" are disposed to take the matter seriously, is sufficiently proved by North's gallant but controvertible statement that all female poets are handsome. "No truly ugly