Can it be that Empire reproduces the type? Yet ethnologists trust more to the shape of the skull in the study of race affinities than to any other proof. The modern Italian skull is the extreme opposite in type; is short and broad; so indeed is the skull of all the continental races of Europe. I know that the skull measurements are not supposed to give this result, but to the eye the English alone seem to possess this long, narrow skull.
Amusing also is it to remark that the Roman women were not handsome. In both races the resemblance between the sexes is too strong. The fine, bony, equine type, so admirable in the male Roman and Englishman, becomes hardness in the women, who lack seduction and charm. Also curious to note, there is the same proud grace of costume and coiffure in the men; the same ugliness and lack of taste in the arrangement of the hair and dress of the women of the two races.
London. June 30.
The Modern Woman and Marriage.
H—— and I dined last night with Mary L—— at the Carleton, and H—— asked her, in his large generic fashion, what everybody had been doing at home during our absence.
"Oh, having their appendices cut out and getting divorced!" she said flippantly, and H—— laughed outrageously, so that people turned and stared. It was probably the lobster we ate that made me think her remark more pathetic than funny while I turned it over in my mind all the long hours I lay awake.
Howells has said, with only humorous apology, that his sex, after nineteen hundred years, is but imperfectly monogamous, and yet our modern women are beginning to treat marriage so disrespectfully, and change partners for life as light-heartedly as if the engagement was as unimportant as an engagement for a dance!
That even this imperfect measure of self-denial and fidelity has been arrived at by men seems to me to be almost solely due to the women of the past. I know the Church claims—in her usual arrogant way—that she should have the credit of it, but Lecky says in his "European Morals":
"The first consequence of the prominence of asceticism was a profound discredit thrown upon the domestic virtues. The extent to which this discredit was carried, the intense hardness of heart and ingratitude manifested by the saints towards those who were bound to them by the closest of earthly ties, is known to few who have not studied the original literature on the subject. These things are commonly thrown into the shade by sentimentalists who delight in idealizing the devotees of the past. To break by his ingratitude the heart of the mother who had borne him, to persuade the wife who adored him that it was her duty to separate from him for ever, to abandon his children, uncared for and beggars, to the mercies of the world, was regarded by the true hermit as the most acceptable offering he could make to his God."