apprenticeship; the professions cannot be adopted without preliminary studies, examinations, and costly fees; but anybody who can scrape together a few hundreds, or even less, may commence as schoolmistress, the question of brains and due preparation for the important functions assumed being entirely unconsidered.

Twice within the last half century have occurred pecuniary crises, which have suddenly reduced women, through the ruin of their natural protectors, from affluence to utter poverty. There was the great crash of 1825-6; there were the terrible Bank failures of 1866. Both these crises cast many poor ladies adrift to get their bread as best they could; the earlier one, especially, flooded the country with incompetent governesses, who were no more fit for the tasks they undertook than are boys of eighteen or nineteen, fresh from school, fit to practise as doctors, or lawyers, or architects. The presumptuous boys the world would not tolerate, even if they were left penniless by dead or bankrupt fathers, who ranked as gentlemen. Society sets itself against quacks in medicine and in law; but it encourages—or until lately did encourage, for the tide of reform has set in pretty strongly-quacks of every degree in education, as if the mind were of infinitely less value than the body and the estate.

Hence sprang up so many of what a recent writer has described as "the baser sort of schools"-a sort, however, which, we are thankful to say, has been extinguished by scores and by hundreds within the last few years. And even the higher order, which has not been raised and improved to meet the exigencies of the period, is no longer extolled as once it was, because society demands something better still. In this baser sort of school-which, however, was quite in keeping with the debased education of the earlier decades, up to the sixth, say, of the present century-shallowness was the predominant characteristic. Nothing was learned thoroughly, though a vast deal was painfully committed to memory, and recited by rote; mental culture was unknown, and "accomplishments" were added as so much tinsel, to set off the scanty intellectual plenishing which was the maximum in these "ladies' seminaries." In these "genteel" establishments a great deal of educational veneering went on, and it answered quite as well as veneer usually does; the manners were carefully Frenchpolished, and the girls were instructed to be ladylike—which, in too many cases, meant being affected, unnatural, unreal, and consequently, essentially vulgar. Those were the days when the girls walked out two and two, at regulation pace generally; or, too often, book in hand, conning the pages to be committed to memory, their teachers imagining that they thus "improved the shining hours." Those were the days, as a writer in an old number of the Cornhill

Magazine says, "when half-a-dozen of them were crammed into a bedroom not airy enough for two; and when they washed their feet all round on Saturday nights with a limited supply of water and towels. When saucy girls invented names of European capitals, and found the most extraordinary places on the map, with full approbation from a short-sighted teacher. When fine filial sentiments were expressed in letters home by twenty or fifty girls at the same time, on invisible lines, and in writing touched up by the writing-master; and when the drawing-master had his hands full before the holidays in putting a good face on the flower and landscape pieces, about to be carried to many homes as an advertisement of the school. The days of the almost universal crooked spines that Dr. Andrew Coombes wrote of in the warning book, which first astonished parents into attending to the physical part of education."

Many things are largely amended since the days of our own pupilage; the objectionable benches or "forms" are superseded; neither are luckless girls, necessarily weak from rapid growth and undeveloped muscles, forced to stand for a full hour at a time, to recite or read in class. Ventilation is cared for, the pupils no longer sleep two in a bed, and six or eight in a room from twelve to fifteen feet square; and reclining boards have multiplied, while stocks and back-boards have almost disappeared; and so far so good. It is something to get in the thin end of the wedge of reform, for it assures us that in due season it will, if we persevere, be driven to the heart of the wood. But the mental culture, the real education, has not kept pace with the improvement in physical training, and Her Majesty's Commissioners in 1870 report as the result of their inquiries into the state of the education of girls"Want of thoroughness and foundation, want of system, slovenliness and showy superficiality, inattention to rudiments, undue time given to accomplishments, and those not taught intelligently or in any scientific manner, want of organisation." A very unsatisfactory state of affairs truly, for which it is only fair to say that the parents are quite as responsible as the teachers. Mrs. Grey puts it that, "the indifference of parents to the education of their daughters, beyond the conventional standard of the society they live in, and the accomplishments which may promote their success in it, is the real stumbling-block in the way of any improvement." It has been imagined that girls are better without too much education! How much "too much" amounts too, it must be difficult to tell; and no one has even attempted to define the exact limits where feminine education ought to stop.

But it seems to us that what has been criticised as "over-education," is really no education at all! for, by it, the powers of the

individual are not educed or even sought to be educed. Only superficialities are produced; only smatterings are acquired, and the whole affair is a sham, a bitter mockery, and a cheat. Semieducation is really the grand error of the age; want of thoroughness lies at the root of nearly all the failures of the instructors of young women; girls have been sedulously taught, not how to learn, but how to cram. And even this cramming-which is a costly process in more ways than one-has been without system and without base. Thus English girls of the middle-class, even when "finished" at expensive boarding-schools, get too little and not too much education; or, rather, what they do get is so disproportioned in all its parts that its utility is destroyed, and its influence terminates with the curriculum.

The Pall Mall Gazette, applauding the system of University examinations for girls, takes up the speculation-which, though it sounds curiously, is rational enough-what will be the effect of this movement on the "matrimonial market," and upon the education of men? The question is not, as so many at once assume it, as to the marrying prospects of stupid men, but as to the marrying inclinations of well-educated women in general. And on this point there does seem some probability of a change. What chiefly sets girls speculating about marriage at eighteen or nineteen, or even earlier, is not so much a longing to be "settled," or dissatisfaction with home, as the want of a definite interest in some work or occupation of real moment, the absence of any present object on which to expend her energies, with a view to any permanent benefit. "If, then, this new movement succeeds in converting the education of girls from a sham into a reality, it will follow that by hundreds and thousands they will be far less impatient for a settlement,' and will by common consent postpone by three or four years the recognised age at which girls may expect to be mistresses of homes of their own. Some people may regret the change, but others will welcome the advent of the theory that a young woman of three-and-twenty is more likely to be wise in her arrangements for her future life, than a girl of eighteen or nineteen." That the general character of women will be materially altered for the better by this scheme for systematising and enlarging the education of girls, can scarcely be doubted. It is certain that most of the defects which men so often cast in the teeth of women are mainly due to the wretched imitation of education which is all that is within the reach of the great majority of England's daughters.

More than thirty years ago one of the most profound and philosophic, and most practical of our nineteenth-century educators felt and expressed the need of something more systematic and definite in the way of female education than was then obtainable, even in the

upper strata of society-a need which these University examinations go far to supply. In January, 1841, Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, wrote to one of his friends:-"I feel quite as strongly as you do the extreme difficulty of giving to girls what really deserves the name of education intellectually. When Jane was young, I used to teach her some Latin with her brothers, and that has been, I think, of real use to her, and she feels it now in reading and translating German, of which she does a great deal. But there is nothing for girls like the degree examination, which concentrates one's reading so beautifully, and makes one master a certain number of books perfectly. And unless we had a domestic examination for young ladies, to be passed before they come out, and another, like the 'great go,' before they come of age, I do not see how the thing can ever be effected. Seriously, I do not see how we can supply sufficient encouragement for systematic and laborious reading, or how we can ensure many things being retained at once fully in the mind, when we are wholly without the machinery which we have for boys. I do nothing now with my girls regularly, owing to want of time. Once for a little while I used to examine in 'Guizot's Civilisation of France,' and I am inclined to think that few better books could be found for the purpose than this, and his 'Civilisation of Europe.' They embrace a great multitude of subjects, and a great variety, and some philosophical questions, amongst the rest, which would introduce a girl's mind a little to that world of thought to which we were introduced by our Aristotle."

And now the very machinery then lacking is supplied, and the test whereby a girl's intellectual status may be very fairly determined furnished by these Cambridge and Oxford examinations, which, on the payment of certain fees, may be secured by the pupils of private as well as public schools. No one in these days believes in the ladies' school-prizes, which were, a few years ago, considered so important an adjunct to the studies of the pupils. In the first place, the prizes stimulated only the quick and the forward; while the timid, the backward, and the dull naturally shrank from competition. Then they were useful only as bribes, with which it is far better to dispense, since the artificial stimulus they create is, like other stimuli, of the briefest duration in its influences. Then, how few schoolmistresses are competent judges in the matter of educational examinations! How many are well-meaning, but incompetent! How many, almost unconsciously to themselves, are mere pretenders to the rank and office which they have assumed, having been trained to vagueness and superficiality in the days of their own youth, and are thus unaware of the want of proportion in the knowledge which they may claim to possess!

And there are some, too many we fear, who are not only unequal

to their duties, but deplorably unfitted for the tasks they have undertaken. It is not long since we heard of the "Lady Principal” of a fashionable school in the South of England asking her German governess, in the course of conversation, if Virgil had not written a life of Dante! The teacher diplomatically replied that "she had not seen it!" And not ten years ago, being ourselves in the company of several schoolmistresses, who made very high pretensions, and professed to "impart a superior education" to elder girls, two out of three were entirely ignorant as to the meaning of the term "watershed;" and we know of another who charged extra "for the use of the globes," and, leaving the lessons to a young and inexperienced teacher, imagined that the two globes in question, which she had never even examined, were the Old World and the New! And so we might go on multiplying instances of gross ignorance and incapacity till we came to the poor old village dame, who, in the article of death, confessed to her clergyman as the crowning sin of her whole life-"I put it in my circ'lars that I taught grammar, and I charged sixpence a week extra for them as learned it, and I never knowed it myself!" This sounds ridiculous and exaggerated, and yet it is not so, for the poor old schoolmistress, after all, did not go much beyond the unfounded pretensions of too many of her more exalted sisters, who, without scruple, profess to teach a great deal which they themselves have never learned.

But this state of things will not continue; as the Lady Principal of Milton Mount College truly observed-"The days are passing away in which women may take up teaching as a mere means of gaining a livelihood, when other resources fail.” It will not be long before an university-certificate will be required for every would-be governess; nor is the time far distant, we trust, when the schoolmistress must produce her diploma, equally with the professional man who cannot secure his clientéle without it. And really capable women will not object to the ordeal through which they must pass, in order to become properly qualified teachers; it is only the ignorant and the prejudiced who will demur, and bewail the evil days in which their lost is cast.

It has been said that the college system will never be popular for girls in England; this we think is a mistake. The Queen's College in Harley Street, and the Ladies' College in Bedford Square are "moves in the right direction; " but these institutions need to be multiplied throughout the country, and to be made as accessible as possible to the whole range of the middle-classes. And the colleges already established in London and elsewhere have now a firm basis to rest upon, which they could scarcely be said to have had before the University of Cambridge granted examinations to girls.

"Women are, themselves, the most powerful educating