THE RANDALL FAMILY I 39
very best of them, in the passages deserving the closest attention, would frequently, sometimes constantly, digress to the crimping of a tucker, the color of a ribbon, the pre- cise pitch of a petticoat, or the bobbing of a bonnet, as much to the annoyance of the reader as was to Peter Pindar the frivolity of the ladies who came to London to see St. Paul's, which is so well taken off in his little poem on the subject. Women possess fancy, but not imagina- tion, and this is why they lack the constructive power which composition in all the fine arts requires. They are practical rather than romantic, and it is a remarkable delu- sion that the imagination of men always attributes romance to women, when in fact they are only invested with it by the imagination of the lover. An elderly gentleman of wide and various experience recently remarked that, while the lover under the stimulus of his passions invested his beloved with every imaginable perfection, she, on the con- trary, was chiefly concerned with the style of the future baby's clothes : a very general but happy illustration of Nature.
There is one kind of intellect, however, more peculiar to women than men, and that is intuition through observation rather than reflection. The finest women, I have noticed, are intensely though imperceptibly observant — a faculty which their physical weakness and need of protection make indispensably necessary to them. Little patient in analy- sis and little adapted to generalization, they mostly make awkward work of such matters when they set about them. As Mr. Hammatt of Ipswich happily remarked, "They know few things for certain " (I merely substitute " few things " for " nothing "),
However, it is certain that, if women and men had the same qualities, they would have but little desire for each
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