318 HIGHER EDUCATION FOR WOMAN. 



the highest mental culture need interfere in any degree with those 

 domestic duties which so gracefully adorn true womanhood. 



I have dwelt on this point with some reiteration, because, so far as 

 my experience goes, the sentiments I combat proceed more frequently 

 from the lips of women than of men. There is a kind of conventional 

 talk, not wholly unknown in our own Toronto circles, which speaks, 

 with half a sneer of '' wise women," '^ blue stockings," and the like ; 

 but it receives its chief countenance from yourselves. Ladies shrink 

 from the ascription of learning, as though ignorance sat as gracefully 

 on them as modesty, or virtue itself. It rests with you to banish this 

 lingering remnant of medieval barbarism. Frown it down as an insult 

 to your sex; while there lingers on your ear the plaintive close of Brown 

 ing's noble dramatic lyric, "The Ring and the Book," in which the 

 widowed poet recalls his ^' Lyric Love," and the rare gold-ring of 

 verse of his poet bride, Elizabeth Barrett Browning : a lady of high 

 scholarship, familiar with the classics of ancient and modern tongues, 

 the greatest of all England's poetesses, but with her memory treasured 

 still more lovingly as wife and mother. 



And so it is when we turn from real to mimic life, and look on 

 Shakespeare's Portia: no longer the barrister in doctor's robes; but 

 the true wife, by whom, only to rescue her husband's friend, had they 

 been assumed. There are, indeed, such occasions in real life, as well 

 as in the world of fiction, when an Elizabeth Fry, or a Florence Night- 

 ingale, may overstep the ordinary limits of woman's true vocation, and 

 yet justify the act by its results. Of such we may fitly exclaim, in 

 Portia's words : — 



" How many things by season season'd are 

 To their right praise and true perfection," 



Nevertheless the aim of higher culture for either man or woman, is 

 not to develope such exceptional nobility; but by maturing their 

 reasoning faculties, and widening their range of thought, to fit them 

 better for every worthy aim and duty of life. 



And now permit me to refer for a moment to my own special theme. 

 in selecting from the wide field of English Literature, a department 

 capable of being turned to useful account within the very brief limits 

 of twenty lectures, I propose, while tracing out in some degree, the 

 growth of the language, to note the national growth itself, as mirrored 

 in the three great ages of Eaglish letters : that of Chaucer, of Shakes- 

 peare, aud of Pope. And in doing so nothing will be more obvious 



