ADDITIONAL NOTES.
No. I.
Fitted for female education.
[Page 25]. We are point blank opposed to allowing females any advantages for education, which can possibly induce their ladyships to set up for literata. “Knowledge is Power,” and whereas the “seraphic sex” are prone to acquire knowledge with more facility, and communicate it with more felicity than the rough samples of humanity with whom Madam Destiny has had the impudence to connect them by ties (pretty easily severed nowadays) we are amazingly apprehensive that ladies will not only monopolize our trade of authorship, but usurp our places in Church, State and Medicine. We have often shed cataracts of tears (Della Crusca) over the following lines of Pope, which, though addressed to lady Montague, will apply equally well to nine hundred and ninety-nine other lady luminaries, in whose presence the light of Dr Caustic is like the glimmer of a glow worm in the glare of sunshine.
“In beauty or wit
No mortal as yet
To question your empire has dared
But men of discerning
Have thought that in learning
To yield to a woman is hard.”
But with leave of the pope, we lords of the lower part of creation will not “yield to a woman.” We will rather let Lord Bacon and the ladies know, by dint of the right of the strongest, that knowledge is not power, but that physical strength is power.
We are excessively provoked with the conductors of the North American Review, who in the No. of that work, dated October, 1835, p. 430, have reviewed, or rather eulogized certain Poems by Mrs Sigourney, and by Miss Gould. And what makes such conduct the more preposterous is that those ladies deserve the encomiums of their admiring Reviewers. They have, likewise, brought into bold relief a great number of lady-authors, such as Miss Burney, Miss Edgworth, Miss Baillie, Miss Martineau, Miss Mitford, Mrs Somerville, Mrs Hemans, Miss Sedgwick, Miss Leslie, Mrs Child, Mrs Hale, &c., whose names and whose merits, correct policy would have consigned to oblivion. Now, be it known, by these presents, that the more merit there happens to be attached to a lady-author, the more her productions should not be taken honorable notice of by a gentleman-critic.
No. II.
In foreign source of yellow fever.
[Page 54]. Some doctors, however, do not coincide in opinion with Dr Caustic on this subject. Dr Miller, in a “Report on the malignant disease, which prevailed in New York, in the autumn of 1805,” has the following passage:
“We live in the latitude of pestilence, and our climate now perhaps is only beginning to display its tendency to produce this terrible scourge. The impurities which time and a police, rather moulded in conformity to the usages of more northern countries than the exigencies of our own, have been long accumulating, are now annually exposed to the heats of a burning summer, and send forth exhalations of the highest virulence.”