tion to the female heart,—they merely puzzled and annoyed. "If scholars talk to women of what they can understand," he says, "their hearers are none the wiser; if they talk of other things, they only prove themselves fools." Mr. Walter Bagehot was quite of Hazlitt's opinion, save that his serener disposition remained unvexed by a state of affairs which seemed to him natural and right. He thought it, on the whole, a wise ordinance of nature that women should look askance upon all intellectual superiority, and that genius should simply "put them out."—"It is so strange. It does not come into the room as usual. It says such unpleasant things. Once it forgot to brush its hair." The well-balanced feminine mind, he insisted, prefers ordinary tastes, settled manners, customary conversation, defined and practical pursuits.
But are women so comfortably and happily indifferent to genius? Some have loved it to their own destruction, feeding it as oil feeds flame; and other some have fluttered about the light, singeing themselves to no great purpose, as pathetically in the way as the doomed moth. At the same time that Hazlitt
