FEMALE EDUCATION. 227 



subdues the passions, directs the feelings, habituates to reflection, and 

 trains to self-denial that which refers all actions, feelings, sentiments, 

 tastes, and passions to the love and fear of God." If to this we add 

 that which hardens the muscles, adds to the fat, quickens and makes 

 graceful the movements, hardens the bones, softens the skin, enriches 

 the blood, promotes but does not over-stimulate the bodily functions, 

 quickens and makes accurate the observation, increases the sense of 

 real beauty of all kinds, promotes the cheerfulness, and develops a 

 sense of universal well-being, we should have, in my opinion, the prin- 

 ciples on which an educational system should be founded. 



George Eliot's Romola was in a sense a learned woman, brought 

 up in the midst of books, and in the atmosphere of culture. Yet she 

 took to love-making, marriage, self-denial, charity, and religion, and 

 deserted her books the moment her duty in them was done. She had 

 no innate love of book-learning ; most of what she had acquired seemed 

 to do her little good in her after-life. It was no guide to her in her 

 difficulties, it was no solace to her in disappointments, it was no resource 

 to her when everything else had failed. It had not taken hold of her 

 nature, because it was not on the great lines on which her nature was 

 constituted. She and her father were as much alike as a man and 

 woman can be. Yet to him his books were an occupation and a 

 delight which he loved, to her their study had been a self-denial all 

 through. 



We all know what Thackeray's women were, and yet he stands 

 very high as a faithful student and expounder of human nature, as it 

 exists. 



When we look at the sort of women again that these great mas- 

 ters of the study of human character made their heroes fall down and 

 worship, we certainly do not find that the schoolmaster had had much 

 to do with the creation of their attractiveness. Hamlet and Ophelia, 

 Adam Bede and Hetty, Deronda and Gwendolen, Lydgate and Rosa- 

 mond, are the common types of men above the common mold taking 

 to women of the unlearned if not quite uneducated type. The thought- 

 ful and scientific Lydgate said about pretty, shallow Rosamond : " She 

 is grace itself ; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished ; that is what 

 a woman ought to be : she ought to produce the effect of exquisite 

 music"; while he said about the stately, thoughtful Dorothea, "The 

 society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work 

 to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise, with sweet 

 laughs for bird-notes and blue eyes for a heaven." 



But it may be said all this was wrong, the result of yielding to 

 unaided, unlearned Nature's lowest affinities, and that it turned out 

 badly for those men. If they had mated suitably, the world would 

 have been better, and they themselves would have been happier. But 

 the physiologist will not readily believe that Nature's mental affinities 

 can be wrong, any more than he can believe that the appetite is not 



