governed. Many women, even those whose minds are entirely uncultivated, show a power and a breadth of capacity in administering their households, and controlling into harmony difficult tempers and unruly wills, which few men could rival.

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Something we had proposed to have said on the political rights of women;" but have left ourselves too little either of time or space. Yet we will not conceal our conviction, that if there be two functions for which women are less specially fitted than any others, they are those of the judge and the legislator. If women are indeed only men a little weaker in the body, then we can understand their entering into direct competition with us, and that the right to vote and legislate is one they may justly claim. If, however, they be really different, and adapted to a sphere of life and action mingling indeed with ours but essentially differing from it, then the question is a more difficult one. It depends upon whether the exercise of such functions would aid the woman's more complete development, and be consistent with the best interests of the whole society. The argument on these questions cannot be compressed into very short space. All we can say is, that women seem to us to have more to lose than to gain by entering in their own right into the political arena; and that, constituted as they now are, and before they have passed through the great transformation they promise us, a large admission of the female element into legislation would probably carry further than any society has yet experienced the special evils of democratic government,-its hasty impulsiveness, its rash action, its discords, its unscrupulousness, and its instability. And yet who shall be bold enough to say that the English constitution shall not, with its slow all-assimilating power, find some safe practical method of including by degrees a portion of direct feminine action? As far as representation goes, it is certain that women possess, from their personal relations

permeating all classes, an absolute security that their ideas and wishes shall be taken into account. If in some respects they continue in a position of social disadvantage, it is because they have themselves chosen to acquiesce in it and fostered the conventional tone of thought and feeling in which it is based. The sincere desires of any large number of the real women in the country necessarily secure immediate attention, and certainly exercise at least their full share of influence over the action

of the men. For women to say they are unrepresented, is as if the sugar in the tea should complain that it was not tasted.

Our observations have been directed not to any attempt to discuss the particular claims made for extension of the sphere of women's action; but to draw attention to the false ideas on which such claims are based by what may be called the more neuter members of the sex and their adherents. Two of these ideas may be selected as most commonly put forward, most evil in their results, and most intrinsically untrue. These are, the idea that women are to be considered as forming a distinct class in society, which ought to possess a distinctive class action and a peculiar class position; and the idea that if they are not men, it is only by some great injustice which demands instant remedy, and that the object of their highest ambition should be a successful rivalry in the masculine career.

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GHOSTS OF THE OLD AND NEW SCHOOL.*

[July 1858.]

MRS. CROWE'S work is not new; but as the most compendious collection of ghost-stories in the language, serves better than any other as a text for what few words we have to say on the subject of the old-fashioned ghosts. The writer is a woman of genius. Her stories of Susan Hopley and Lilly Dawson are models of straightforward narration. A female De Foe could not have told them better; if, indeed, such stories can be said to be told, which seem rather like the conscientious detail of real incident. The power of producing this effect is not the result of art, any more than that undefinable tone which lies in a man's voice, when he means what he says, is the result of art. It is the untraceable transfer of something in the writer to his page. It is the influence, how exerted we cannot analyse, of a peculiar sort of mind and imagination. Such writers stamp their pages with the intensity of their own convictions. It is a characteristic of their minds that they will have reality or nothing. Most of us possess a certain nebulous district in our minds, inhabited by the things we are not sure of; we keep a suspense account of matters not yet determined, and many of which we are content enough to see no

*The Night Side of Nature. By Catherine Crowe. London: J. C. Newby, 1848.

son.

Spirit Drawings: a Personal Narrative. By W. M. WilkinLondon: Chapman and Hall, 1858.

An Angel's Message: being a Series of Angelic and Holy Communications, received by a Lady. London: John Wesley and Co., 1858.

F F

present hope of determining. But the De-Foe school of mind has no such half-beliefs. Truth to them consists not so much in accumulation of evidence as in firmness of grip. When they have got fast hold of a thing, they believe it; that is, there is with them a belief of the imagination stronger than the belief of the reason. With the sort of bulldog tenacity which they possess, they fasten upon things new and old, false and true; and the difference between these things is merged in the common vividness with which they stand before the eye of the mind. These are the people to tell ghost-stories and make you believe them: they make tangible things where names are the names for nonentity. They grasp a spectre as if it were a walking-stick, and hold a disembodied spirit hard and fast by the button. The confidence which other men repose in their senses, or in their intuitions, is a bagatelle to the blind earnestness of conviction with which these minds hold to the phantasmata of their imaginations.

De Foe believed his own invented facts as much as if they were real external ones; and his imaginative fictions, from the strength of his own hold upon them, became lies to other people. This is not Mrs. Crowe's way. She invents no apparitions, and tells no history of a Cavalier; but she shows a common nature in the placid depth of conviction with which she handles her favourite subject-matter. You, she says to her reader, may believe in ghosts or not, as you please; I merely state these facts, and leave you to dispose of them as you can. For herself, she would far rather "doubt truth to be a liar." Thus she tells her stories well: she always has her eye firmly on the ghost she knows is there; and steadily pressing through to get at him, she brushes away the imperfect evidence, doubts, and hesitations, which obscure him from our more hesitating vision. The more wonderful a story is, the more ardently she welcomes it; the more incredible it is, the less is she inclined to ques

tion the foundation on which it rests; and in her own heart she believes it impossible that it should be false, provided it be but sufficiently near being impossible. If she speaks of evidence at all, it is boldly to reverse all the usual and natural practice of the mind. She summons us, irrespectively of the testimony, to believe what is foreign to our experience unless we can disprove it. The majority of persons, she tells us, "forget that nobody has a right to call any belief superstitious until he can prove that it is unfounded."

This is an alarming assertion. Has even Mrs. Crowe herself acted on it? If so, she must have gone through a vast course of inquiry, to make her competent to disbelieve in very little. We should like to know some of the results. Is Aladdin's lamp true or disproved? What is the logical demonstration that ghouls, jinns, and afreets do not exist? Is that true about the bottle of smoke which expanded into a giant? Is it proposed to recognise or disprove the spiritual existence of the members of the Hindoo mythology, from Vishnu down to the substratum of tortoise; of "Peor and Baalim," "Isis and Orus and the dog Anubis;" of the deities of Greece and Rome; of Odin, Baldur, and the tree Ygdrasil; of the Great Spirit, the Premundane Bear and Squirrel, and all the chaos of pagan and savage superstitions? Are there just limits, and if so, what limits founded on disproof, to our belief in fates, furies, norns, nymphs, naiads, oreads, hamadryads, nereids, fairies, goblins, trolls, peris, deevs, imps, familiars, nikkers, dwarfs, mermen and maids, the Sandman, Rumpelstiltzkin, Dr. Faustus, and the dog Cerberus? Hades, we know, is much in vogue just now; but is Charon the correct thing? and how about the Elysian fields? Do Antony and Cleopatra there walk “hand in hand, and with their sprightly port make the ghosts gaze"? How would this idea of Mrs. Crowe's, if widely received, affect our education, and especially our theology? Imagine "Arguments against Fetish-worship,