Page:Varia.djvu/29

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THE ETERNAL FEMININE.
17

estal of industrious domesticity. I have little doubt that their great-grandmothers, who worked—or did not work—the tapestries upon the Addisonian walls, were in their day the subject of many pointed reproaches, and bidden to look backward on the departed virtues of still remoter generations. And, by the same token, it is encouraging to think that, in the years to come, we too shall figure as lost examples of distinctly feminine traits; we too shall be praised for our sewing and our silence, our lack of learning and our "stayathomeativeness," that quality which Peacock declared to be the finest and rarest attribute of the sex. What a pleasure for the new woman of to-day, who finds herself vilified beyond her modest deserts, to reflect that she is destined to shine as the revered and faultless great-grandmother of the future.

To return, however, to the contrasting nature of the complaints lodged against her in her more fallible character of great-granddaughter. Hazlitt, who was by no means indifferent to women nor to their regard, clearly and angrily asserted that intellectual attainments in a man were no recommenda-