selves, either saying nothing of it, or representing it, with half-unconscious guile, as the cream of intellectual sweetness. The inquisitive man who went into a side-show on the invitation of the showman, to see a wagon with one wheel, and saw a wheelbarrow, came out, Mr. Joe Miller avers, with such enthusiasm in his eyes and such laudation on his lips that the bystanders rushed pell-mell to view the marvel, from which they, too, returned in a state of misleading effusiveness. Something must be pardoned to the spirit of getting even; but more, I should own in candor, to an honest belief in the marvel extolled. Nothing in fact can be more natural than to exaggerate the value of that which has cost us dear, particularly when it is avouched to be invaluable by the practice of venerable institutions, and the authority of illustrious names, not to mention the prescription of centuries. Such, I think, are the chief things which have conspired with the bell-wether bias, to keep up the long, and senseless, and injurious pursuit of free development in the fetters of the ancients.
Be this explanation as it may, it is high time, and past high time, that the pursuit under these conditions were abandoned. It has been continued ages too long. If not abandoned, I am strongly tempted to predict that man, handicapped by the conditions, will be passed by woman, now almost abreast of him, and that before the end of the next century, unless woman gets handicapped herself, our great poets, novelists, historians, scientists, and philosophers—the leaders of thought and masters of style—will wear petticoats or Turkish trousers, and the lords of the creation, sent to the rear, will become hewers of words and drawers of grammar to the weaker vessels—their better-halves in very truth—the real architects of mind and acknowledged captains of civilization. Let the paragon of animals look to his supremacy. If he sticks to the dead languages, I see but one hope for him; and that is to persuade woman to accept for herself the chains that have been fastened on him, and which he has not had the wit or the manliness to break. This is his only hope, and the fortune of the tailless fox in Æsop admonishes him not to put his trust in this; although it must be acknowledged, in view of the course of study at such institutions as Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and Girton, that the modern Reynard seems to be crying up his mutilated extremity with somewhat greater effect than his prototype of old was able to reach. But this, I hope, is more in appearance than in reality. When he of the fable opened his speech against tails, and proceeded with his ingenious reasoning, there were present in the assembly doubtless a few silly foxes who exchanged approving nods, hastily agreed that tails were inconvenient appendages, and perhaps went so far as to cut off their own on the spot, and range themselves ostentatiously under the countenance of the Great Tailless; but when the speech, clever yet extremely thin, was finished, and the settled sense of the meeting found a fitting voice, there was an end of all that nonsense. And
