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THE ETERNAL FEMININE.
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accused the whole sex of this impatient disregard for inspiration, Keats found it only too devoted at the shrine. "I have met with women," he says with frank contempt, "who I really think would like to be wedded to a poem, and given away by a novel." At the same time that Mr. Pater said coldly that there were duties to the intellect which women but seldom understood, Sir Francis Doyle protested with humorous indignation against the frenzy for female education which filled his lecture-room with petticoats, and threatened to turn the universities of England into glorified girls' schools. At the same time that Froude was writing, with the enviable self-confidence which was his blessed birthright, that it is the part of man to act and labor, while women are merely bound by "the negative obedience to prohibitory precepts;" or, in other words, that there is nothing in the world which they ought to do, but plenty which they ought to refrain from doing, Stevenson was insisting with all the vehemence of youth that it is precisely this contentment with prohibitory precepts, this deadening passivity of the female heart, which "narrows and damps