my Edith quits the convent, where she had hidden her sorrows, to view the fight, yet declares herself unable to look steadfastly at the battle which rages in the distance, the marvellous insight into its varied fortunes with which her sister Elfrida is endowed is a gift rather to be desired than expected in any young lady similarly situated. The act ends by their retiring from the field on a false report of the victory of the English. My third and last act opened by showing Harold, disappointed of succour from his newmade brother-in-law, and hard pressed by his foes, still finding time to commend his lost Edith to Oswald's care (her supposed new lover), and to learn from him the truth of her unbroken faith to himself. With strong expressions of grief and remorse he meets the fatal arrow, and dies exclaiming "I shall not live to see my country's chains, Or to bewail the loss of Edith's love." That excellent young person's lamentations, when the tidings of Harold's death reach her, are, I regret to say, somewhat wanting in passion. However, she remains at her post, refusing to fly with Oswald and Elfrida, to whom that obliging young man has consented to transfer his affections. I may remark that this is not the only young couple whom I, with some ingenuity, contrived to make happy amidst their country's wreck. Algitha, after rather a spirited scene with her mother-in-law, is rescued from the Norman soldiers by her still faithful Eldred. I recollect that I felt it due to my readers to alleviate their anguish on behalf of Edith and Harold by at least two underplots that ended well. And having got through my battle with singularly little effusion of blood-Harold's death and that of the soldier from whom Algitha was rescued being the only two recorded-I could employ a larger number of my corps dramatique in the task of burying the dead than could the great anonymous author of 'Pyramus and Thisbe,' who, you will remember, leaves no one to discharge the duty but Lion and Moonshine. I, agreeably to history, had Githa ready to enter William's tent (like aged Priam) and beg the body of her son from the Conqueror. But before her entrance, not liking to leave him in undisturbed enjoyment of his hour of victory, I brought in once more the irrepres sible Hilda to foretell to the proud Norman the unquiet life and insecure grave which awaited him, with the ills that were to befall his sons. Whether William's fierce refusal at first to allow the burial of the man who broke the oath he swore to him on the holy relics should be ascribed to the irritation produced in his mind by Hilda's well-meant but wearisome effusion, or whether rather his final permission to Githa to inter her son's body was wrung from him by wholesome terror of Hilda's dark picture of his future, I leave for the consideration of others. At all events, my play closed with the battle-field, dimly lighted by the torches of Githa's train, while she vainly searches it for the body of her son. enters after a while and succeeds in finding the slain Harold. Githa bespeaks his brief epitaph, "Harold Infelix," and then dies beside her son. Edith But Edith lives to lead the mournful procession which bears the dead mother with the dead son to her own convent refuge. I know that I strove hard to bring out the pathos of my closing scene. I perhaps did not wholly fail when I made Edith say of her dead lover, that to herself "His voice o'erpowers the music of the world;" but I see that nature was too strong for me. I could not know at thirteen how lovers love. A mother's love I had enjoyed; and so, while I made the forsaken Edith say a good deal that was more or less to the purpose, I made the bereaved Githa say little and die. Schiller, in an earlier play than that which contains his self-sacrificing Thecla (whom I remember childishly thinking I would copy when I made Edith resign Harold for his own good), bids a hero reverence the dreams of his youth. I feel just a little remorse at having invited the public here to laugh at some of mine. Still, I hope it has been harmless fun for both them and me. I do not think I was the worse for having tried so hard to write verses in my childhood, and rather believe that having done so may have helped me to the many hours of happiness which I have enjoyed from that day to this with Spenser or Shakespeare, Dante or the Greek poets before me. And you, my reader, be frank and confess that in your earlier years you were as foolish if not so industrious as I, and if you did not undertake great historical plays, yet wrote lyrics which you thought very charming at the time, and read aloud to an audience, "fit though few," which applauded you to the echo. Or if the pleasing madness never seized you-for sometimes these things do skip one generation-take one of your sons aside and ask him to tell you in strict confidence whether in moments snatched from the serious business of life, such as cricket and football, he too is not preparing himself to write a tragedy by diligent study of, shall we say, Freeman's 'Norman Conquest,' and 'Strafford : an Historical Drama,' by John Sterling? If so, have the goodness to tell him, with my compliments, that The Finding of the Body of Harold' is now an interdicted subject to poets as well as to painters, having been done as well as is possible by a person of tender years long before he was born; and that if he doubts my word and proceeds in his rash enterprise, I may revenge myself upon him by even yet publishing Harold' in extenso; but that, if he will oblige me by moving on to 'The Death of Rufus,' or 'Murder of Thomas à Becket,' and send me his tragedy, I may, not impossibly, review it rather more favourably than I have done my own; for we know, on excellent authority, that severe critics are authors who have failed themselves; and how could I bear, by injudicious severity towards another, to confess that my own 'Harold' was after all a failure? A WOMAN-HATER. PART VI.-CHAPTER XV. "WHEN I reached Great Britain, the right of women to Medicine was in this condition-a learned lawyer explained it carefully to me; I will give you his words.-The unwritten law of every nation admits all mankind, and not the male half only, to the study and practice of medicine and the sale of drugs. In Great Britain this law is called the common law, and is deeply respected. Whatever liberty it allows to men or women is held sacred in our courts, until directly and explicitly withdrawn by some Act of the Legislature. Under this ancient liberty women have occasionally practised general medicine and surgery, up to the year 1858. But, for centuries, they monopolised, by custom, one branch of practice, the obstetric, and that, together with the occasional treatment of children, and the nurs ing of both sexes, which is semimedical, and is their monopoly, seems, on the whole, to have contented them, till late years, when their views were enlarged by wider education, and other causes. But their abstinence from general practice, like their monopoly of obstetrics, lay with women themselves, and not with the law of England. That law is the same in this respect as the common law of Italy and France; and the constitution of Bologna, where so many doctresses have filled the chairs of medicine and other sciences, makes no more direct provision for female students than does the constitution of any Scotch or English university. The whole thing lay with the women themselves, and with local civilisation. Years ago, Italy was far more civilised than England; so Ital ian women took a large sphere. Of late the Anglo-Saxon has gone in for civilisation with his usual energy, and is eclipsing Italy; therefore his women aspire to larger spheres of intellect and action, beginning in the States, because American women are better educated than English. The advance of women, in useful attainments, is the most infallible sign in any country of advancing civilisation. All this about civilisation is my observation, sir, and not the lawyer's. Now for the lawyer again.-Such being the law of England, the British Legislature passed an Act in 1858, the real object of which was to protect the public against incapable doctors, not against capable doctresses or doctors. The Act excludes from medical practice all persons whatever, male or female, unless registered in a certain register; and to get upon that register, the person, male or female, must produce a licence or diploma, granted by one of the British examining boards specified in a schedule attached to the Act. "Now these examining boards were all members of the leading medical schools. If the Legislature. had taken the usual precaution, and had added a clause compelling those boards to examine worthy applicants, the Act would have been a sound public measure; but for want of that foresight and without foresight a lawgiver is an impostor and a public pest-the State robbed women of their old common-law rights with one hand, and with the other enabled a respectable trades-union to thrust them out of their new statutory rights. Unfortunately, the respectable union, to whom the Legis "For all that, two female practitioners got upon the register, and stand out, living landmarks of experience and the truth, in the dead wilderness of surmise and prejudice. lature delegated an unconstitutional soon evaporated or precipitated, and power they did not claim themselves, only the truth stands firm. of excluding qualified persons from examination, and so robbing them of their licence and their bread, had an overpowering interest to exclude qualified women from medicine; they had the same interest as the watchmakers' union, the printers', the painters on china, the calico engravers', and others, have to exclude qualified women from those branches, though peculiarly fitted for them, but not more so than they are for the practice of medicine, Nature having made them, and not men, the medical, and unmusical, sex. "Wherever there's a trades-union, the weakest go to the wall. Those vulgar unions I have mentioned exclude women from skilled labour they excel in, by violence and conspiracy, though the law threatens them with imprisonment for it was it in nature, then, that the medical union would be infinitely forbearing, when the Legislature went and patted it on the back, and said, you can conspire with safety against your female rivals? Of course the clique were tempted more than any clique could bear, by the unwariness of the Legislature, and closed the doors of the medical schools to female applicants. Against unqualified female practitioners they never acted with such zeal and consent; and why?—the female quack is a public pest, and a good foil to the union; the qualified doctress is a public good, and a blow to the union. "The British medical union was now in a fine attitude by Act of Parliament. It could talk its contempt of medical women, and act its terror of them, and keep both its feigned contempt and its real alarm safe from the test of a public examination, that crucible in which cant, surmise, and mendacity are VOL. CXX.-NO. DCCXXXIII. "I will tell you how they got in. The Act of Parliament makes two exceptions: first, it lets in, without examination-and that is very unwise-any foreign doctor who shall be practising in England at the date of the Act, although, with equal incapacity, it omits to provide that any future foreign doctor shall be able to demand examination (in with the old foreign fogies, blindfold, right or wrong; out with the rising foreign luminaries of an ever-advancing science, right or wrong); and secondly, it lets in, without examination, to experiment on the vile body of the public, any person, qualified or unqualified, who may have been made a doctor by a very venerable and equally irrelevant functionary. Guess, now, who it is that a British Parliament sets above the law, as a doctor-maker for that public it professes to love and protect!" "The Regius Professor of Medicine?" "No." "Tyndal?" "Then I give it up." "This is no joke. Bright monument of British flunkeyism and imbecility, there stands the clause setting that reverend and irrelevant doctor-maker above the law, which sets his Grace's female relations below the law, and, in practice, outlaws the whole female population, starving those who desire to practise medicine learnedly, 20 and oppressing those who, out of modesty, not yet quite smothered by custom and monopoly, desire to consult a learned female physician, instead of being driven, like sheep, by iron tyranny-in a country that babbles Liberty-to a male physician or a female quack. "Well, sir, in 1849 Miss Elizabeth Blackwell fought the good fight in the United States, and had her troubles; because the States were not so civilised then as now. She graduated Doctor at Geneva in the State of New York. "She was practising in England in 1858, and demanded her place on the register. She is an Englishwoman by birth; but she is an English M.D. only through America having more brains than Britain. This one islander sings, Columbia!' as often as 'God save the Queen!' I reckon. Hail, "Miss Garrett, an enthusiastic student, travelled north, south, east, and west, and knocked in vain at the doors of every great school and university in Britain; but at last found a chink in the iron shutters of the London Apothecaries. It seems Parliament was wiser in 1815 than in 1858, for it inserted a clause in the Apothecaries Act of 1815 compelling them to examine all persons who should apply to them for examination, after proper courses of study. Their charter contained no loophole to evade the Act, and substitute him' for 'person;' so they let Miss Garrett in as a student. Like all the students, she had to attend lectures on chemistry, botany, materia medica, zoology, natural philosophy, and clinical surgery. In the collateral subjects they let her sit with the male students; but in anatomy and surgery she had to attend the same lectures privately, and pay for lectures all to herself. This cost her enormous fees. However, it is only fair to say that, if she had been one of a dozen female students, the fees would have been diffused; as it was, she had to gild the pill out of her private purse. "In the hospital teaching she met difficulties and discouragement, though she asked for no more opportunities than are granted readily to professional nurses and female amateurs. But the whole thing is a mere money question; that is the key to every lock in it. "She was freely admitted at last to one great hospital, and all went smoothly till some surgeon examined the students vivá voce; then Miss Garrett was off her guard, and displayed too marked a superiority; thereupon the male students played the woman, and begged she might be excluded; and, I am sorry to say, for the credit of your sex, this unmanly request was complied with by the womanish males in power, "However, at her next hospital, Miss Garrett was more discreet, and took pains to conceal her galling superiority. "All her trouble ended-where her competitors' began-at the public examination. She passed brilliantly, and is an English apothecary. In civilised France she is a learned physician. "She had not been an apothecary a week, before the Apothecaries' Society received six hundred letters from the medical small-fry in town and country; they threatened to send no more boys to the Apothecaries, but to the College of Surgeons, if ever another woman received an apothecary's license. Now you know all men tremble in England at the threats of a tradesunion; so the Apothecaries instantly cudgelled their brains to find a way to disobey the law, and obey the union. The medical press gave them a hint, and they passed a by-law, forbidding their students |