THE WOMEN OF ITALY.

If it were always permitted to draw an obvious inference from the most irrefutable precedents, without incurring the sneers of scepticism, we might almost venture to affirm that the days of man upon earth are drawing to a close, and that the long-dreaded millennium is at hand.

Yet a few more efforts of mechanical ingenuity, and the plough will ride unguided over the field like a railway train, steamers will glide like ducks over the waters, without noise or smoke, and balloons will be curbed and bridled like Ariosto's hippogriffs.

nents.

Already the influence of climate has been utterly neutralized. Our coal has been made to answer all the purposes of an Italian sun. It has all its warmth, its light, its life. England has become the metropolis of the vegetable kingdom, and the horticultural gardens at Chiswick are the flora of both contiA shop in Regent Street has been turned into nature's own workshop, exhibiting within its genial temperature all the mysteries of an artificial maternity. Mr. Espy of Philadelphia has thrown his spell over the storms, and offers to sell rain by the bucket to the highest bidder. In short, it will go hard with us if, ere we are many years older, we do not see the

isthmuses of Suez and Panama cut through, a rail-road tunnel driven through the bowels of the Alps, and a suspensionbridge launched across the Atlantic.

Then will there be rest for man and beast. Then will men grow weary of watching with folded arms the progress of their self-acting tailoring apparatus, and, impatient of a state of inactivity inconsistent with their nature, they will, like Alexander, complain that their fathers left nothing for them to do, and look out for another world, the earth being much too narrow for them.

Nor do we hesitate to affirm that the moral improvement of the human race has kept pace with physical discovery. The teetotallers strive boldly to undo the work of Noah. Wilberforce has razed the patriarch's curse from the heads. of the devoted children of Canaan; the peace-societies hope to rivet the sword of war to its scabbard, and to turn all the nations of the earth into a vast Quaker community. Reason and justice are soon to obtain an undisputed ascendancy over force. The French are raising a Chinese wall round Paris, to save them the trouble of fighting for their country. All ancient grievances will be amicably settled. All nations will vie with each other in forgetting old grudges, and redressing time-sanctioned injustices. But the most natural as well as the most glorious result of this voluntary abnegation of the right of the strongest will be the cessation of an abuse of power as ancient as Eden, a revolution to be operated by the suppression of a single word in the marriage ceremony, the rehabilitation of a much-injured being into its natural rights the emancipation of woman.

Already the champions of the trampled sex, the Chapmans and Martineaus, have unfolded the standard of independence. Having at first trained themselves to public controversy in the cause of abolitionism, they soon learned to stand up, like Cicero, pro domo sud, in vindication of their inalienable right of sitting in senates and parliaments, and being elbowed and squeezed on the hustings. Another more formidable combattant, the fair authoress of Woman and her Master," after searching in the treasures of the past with unwearied

diligence, has fully demonstrated that woman in all ages and countries (not excepting even such characters as Aspasia and Messalina) has been and is a middle creature between a lamb and an angel, perverted, fettered, and tortured, by another selfish being, half-demon, half-brute.

With all our heart do we congratulate these lovely emancipators on the favourable prospect that everything is taking before them, and wish them a speedy success in an enterprise which, as it would most powerfully contribute to bring about that new order of things, that golden age of peace aud justice which has been hitherto considered incompatible with the frailty of human nature, would be the most infallible sign of the forth-coming close of time."

Female writers in England, France, and America, are pretty nearly a match for their male opponents, and if the sword is to be definitely laid aside, and the field open for a fair and impartial discussion, we have no doubt but women will in the end talk men out of countenance. But to whatever extent these ladies may carry their female radicalism, they will easily perceive that their social reforms will not be immediately applicable to all countries alike; and as we hear every day of nations being unripe for the blessing of liberal institutions, as we see statesmen insisting on the necessity of fitting a people for better destinies by the gradual influence of civilization and culture, so it will be likewise understood that the fair sex cannot be everywhere equally ready for an immediate enfranchisement, and that, for instance, the Georgian slave of an eastern harem conld not be as easily trained to take her share in the weighty deliberations of the sublime Porte, as a Yankee girl might be called to sit among the members of Congress.

These reflections were awakened in our mind at the sight of the work of which the title stands at the head of the present article, and we were curious to ascertain what notions concerning woman's mission might be entertained by a lady born and bred up in a country in which the persons of her sex are kept in something like a middle station between oriental seclusion and what would strike every other traveller but

We like to look over a book written by a lady. There is, we believe, an immense tract of unknown world in the female heart; there exists between these two sexes, created so essentially to belong to and to be necessary to each other, to share all hopes and fears, all cares and enjoyments of life, a barrier of conventional dignity and propriety, of sexual etiquette, which almost every lover and husband flatters himself with removing, but which perhaps no living man ever succeeded in so doing, and which we do not know but it were perhaps unadvisable that every one should attempt to remove.

Yet it is but too natural that we should all stand on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of this terra incognita, and we would willingly renounce all the pleasure derivable from one of Captain Parry's voyages to the North Pole, or from an American South Sea expedition, to be enabled to overhear, without indelicacy, a conversation between two fair bosom friends in some trying and unguarded moment, or to possess the key to that magic telegraph of nods and winks and smiles by which two female spirits commune with each other before company, to the utter mystification of the duller sex.

"

Next to this would be the other no less unhallowed gratification of intercepting one of those four-page, small-hand, close-written, cross-lined feminine epistles, to the uninitiated conveying scarcely any meaning at all, but where, in every turning in every letter, the corresponding parties are enabled to decipher so much more than meets the eye. »

Next to this, again, is the pleasure of perusing the works of a female author; for although the fair writer, knowing that her page is to stand the full glare of broad daylight, may be constantly on her guard lest she should by any involuntary indiscretion jeopardize the secret interests of the community, yet some unlucky expression, some half-word may, in the heat of inspiration, happen to drop from her pen, which will shoot like wild-fire across the benighted understanding of a man who can read, and do more than an

age of learning towards his initiation into the mysteries of female freemasonry.

Of these voluntary confessions and involuntary revelations, thanks to heaven, in our own country, we have enough; and the new novels and essays by ladies, misses and mistresses, issuing every year from the English press, bid fair to leave scarcely one fold of the female heart unexplored, scarcely one blush of the maiden's cheek unaccounted for.

But if this be the case in Old and New England, as well as in France and Germany, the same can hardly be said of the Italian peninsula, where, with the exception of a very few Petrarchesque poetesses, and still fewer moral or ascetic writers, man seems still almost completely to monopolize the trade of book-making.

For this apparent sterility of the female mind in the land of Vittoria Colonna and Olimpia Morata, it would not perhaps But the most be difficult to adduce many important reasons. insurmountable obstacle against female authorship lies in the deep-rooted antipathy, or, if we must call it so, prejudice, of the people of that country against any attempt on the part of a woman to call upon herself the gaze of the multitude or court notoriety.

The Italians, a highly sensitive and cultivated nation, are as far from grudging the tender and timid creatures whom they associate with their destinies through life, the advantages of a liberal education, as any other people can well be; but a fond notion-it may be a mistaken one-prevails among them, that all a lady's accomplishments and acquirements should be exclusively consecrated to enliven that little domestic circle which she is called to bless with her presence. Hence an authoress, no less than an actress or an improvisatrice, is for them an anomaly, an exceptional being who has cast aside all the delicacy, grace, and modesty, which constitute the peculiar charm of her sex, and thereby forsworn its inalienable privileges, and rendered herself liable to the disrespect of the other.

Female authorship in Italy is looked upon as a kind of moral anomaly; nor would the high station and still higher