226 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



intellectual work in youth. Their constitutions were not spoiled by- 

 study. They had fair faces, and womanly forms, and warm affections, 

 and strong, impulsive passions, and mother-wit, and keen discernment, 

 and most vigorous resolution, but nothing that we would call learning 

 — not one of them. Portia, who acted the most learned part of all 

 Shakespeare's women, vehemently describes herself as 



" An unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed." 



George Eliot has created for us a whole host of young women, all 

 real, all true to nature. Herself a woman, and a genius of the highest 

 order ; penetrating, learned, accomplished, subtile, and with a power 

 of discriminating language unequaled in our generation ; a wife and 

 mother too — she was the best-fitted woman of the age unquestionably 

 to draw for us a picture of young womanhood, highly educated in 

 knowledge, up to the educationalist's ideal. Where do you find such 

 a character in her writings ? Dorothea in " Middlemarch " had ex- 

 actly the makings of the successful omnivorous young female students 

 of the present day ; intellectual, conscientious, hyper-conscientious — 

 as such young women so often are to their cost — " studious, her mind 

 was theoretic, and yearned after some lofty conceptions of the world. 

 . . . She was enamored of intensity and greatness." She was self-sac- 

 rificing to a fault. She was often ardent, and not in the least self-ad- 

 miring. Yet Dorothea is not highly educated in the modern sense. 

 Perhaps a modern educationalist would say that that was the reason 

 poor Dorothea made such a mess of it, and threw herself away first 

 on a selfish, shallow old brute, thinking he was a hero, and then on 

 the least interesting fellow in the book. 



One of the finest studies of adolescence in the female sex, from the 

 mental side, is Gwendolen Harleth, in " Daniel Deronda." The pic- 

 ture is worthy of study by all persons who take an interest in human 

 nature. Gwendolen was neither good nor studious. She was idle in 

 learning, and she was selfish. She had a vast amount of subjective 

 egoism, tending toward objective dualism, resolute action from in- 

 stinct, a setting at defiance of calculation and reason, yet acting most 

 reasonably toward the end in view. She was full of sentimentality, 

 of inchoate religious instinct, of a desire for notice. Yet she was un- 

 deniably a fine young woman, and is a type of a large mass of the 

 young women whom our modern educationalists would like to set to 

 work for eight hours a day, from the age of thirteen to twenty, ac- 

 quiring book-learning. I confess I more agree with Hannah More's 

 notion of education for such a girl : " I call education not that which 

 smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to con- 

 solidate a firm and regular system of character, that which tends to 

 form a friend, a companion, and a wife. I call education not that 

 which is made up of shreds and patches, of useless arts, but that which 

 inculcates principles, polishes taste, regulates temper, cultivates reason, 



