way. We see light between the chinks, and before another half century it will be open wide. Let us take the art of design, for example. Up to the present time, no woman ever dreamed of initiating even in needlework anything beyond punching holes in cambric and then sewing them up again. Take the piece of embroidery out of your sister’s work-box, good reader, and see what you can make of it—if there is head or tail, form of beauty, rectilinear or curvilinear, to be found in it, your sister must be a rara avis. Our mothers and grandmothers, as we know by those prized pieces of silk and worsted work which still hang on the walls and fade gradually away in gloomy corners of upper bedrooms, were not an atom in advance of ourselves. How could it be otherwise? Art culture, as a matter of national education, is only just beginning to be recognised. In the Great Exhibition of 1851, we suddenly discovered that we were utterly deficient in both form and colour; but since then we have gone to work with a will. In every important manufacturing town in England there is now a Government School of Design, spreading a love of art over the entire country, and educating the eye in the appreciation of all beautiful forms, and practising the hand in their reproductions. These schools are attended by fully as many ladies as gentlemen. The visitor need only visit one of these schools to be convinced that intelligent female labour in these admirable establishments is educating itself for scores of occupations entirely new to this country. As it is, we are indebted to the French for all our first-class designers. Most of the great manufacturers interested in the production of articles in which there is an Art-element, employ a French designer at a very high salary. We have no hesitation in saying, that in future the Schools of Design will supply native artists for these posts; and not only in designing for our textile fabrics, but in modelling for the goldsmith, and the statuary, female labour—through this door opened ready for them by the Government—will speedily flow in. We have heard many intelligent men doubt the female aptitude for the fine arts; and, certainly, as long as we could only point to the works of an Angelica Kauffmann, it was difficult to gainsay them; but Rosa Bonheur has cleared away that difficulty, and has proved that the female brush can paint with the vigour of Snyders and the poetical grace of Landseer. The reason why they have not hitherto challenged the men in the field of art is plain enough.
They have never been trained. The young girls of the upper ten thousand are indeed taught drawing at finishing schools by some wretched drawing-master; instructed in the production of sickly rose groups, or set pencil landscapes, in which the usual formula is half a dozen woolly trees, a church spire, of course, and three crows to enliven the vast expanse of sky. Here we see the blind, indeed, leading the blind. The daughters who do not go to finishing schools have never been taught even how to make a straight line. Yet watch them working at the schools of design. Intelligent young girls, whose dress betokens the struggles of the homes from which they issue, after a year’s study handle the crayon with a freedom and boldness that at once dissipates the notion that art is not for them. The secret of their success is, that they have adopted drawing as a profession. How many thousands of respectable young girls there are in this country predestined to labour for their bread; whose parents know that they must do so; yet we find them left utterly untrained for any really useful purpose in life. The curate, with his proverbially large family of girls, brings up his fair family to present poverty and to the prospect of bitter struggles to sustain life when he is gone. They may some of them marry, but the chances are against them; some of them will, in all probability, descend to the posts of nursery governesses, or of female companions. If that terrible Mrs. Grundy would only cease to tyrannise as she does, why may not this fair family determine with woman’s courage to prepare to do woman’s work? The means even of the curate would suffice to give them admittance to the schools of design, and then Rose may take wood-engraving as a profession. The abolition of the paper duty will give an immense impetus to literature, and artistic labour such as hers will be in great demand; and Mary, why should she not be a modeller for the jeweller? and Kate, why should she not enter the field of art as a painter? We can imagine a family thus working at their different art tasks with somewhat more satisfaction than in reading insipid novels, or embroidering fierce brigands in worsted work, in which the coarseness of the canvas causes that delightful man’s nose to ascend in a series of well-defined steps. In the one case they would work with the feeling of real artists, and therefore their labour would be a labour of love, and we may add, of profit also.
Mr. Bennett, who has laboured so earnestly to open the manufacture of watches to women, told us an anecdote the other day, which illustrates at once the difficulties women have to contend with (from the other sex, we are sorry to say) in making their way into a sphere of labour hitherto considered sacred to the men, and the success that attended their courageous efforts. Three young ladies, after a preliminary training at the Marlborough House School of Design, applied to him for occupation in engraving the backs of gold watches. Although perfect strangers to this kind of work, in six months, he tells us, they became as practised artists as a mere apprentice would have been in six years. At the end of this time, when they were making each three pounds a-week by their labour, the men in the shop struck. These “foreigners,” as they were termed, must go, or they would; and Mr Bennett was obliged, sadly against his will, to comply with their wishes. These brave girls, however, were not to be beaten; they immediately turned their attention to engraving on glass, and are now employed at this delicate employment, and earn as much thereat as they did before at watch engraving. What these young girls did, thousands of well educated young ladies may do also. And yet, despite Mrs. Grundy, we dare maintain that to engrave a watch, or to embellish the crystal for our table, is quite as elevated an occupation as to see that Master