No more by this steamer. Let me see; in ten days, perhaps, Harry will be with you at breakfast, discussing my letter, and lamenting my lot, to live so far from the world. For me, however, a contented disposition, the steamers twice a-month, and Blackwood monthly, do wonders. I see as much of the world as a good man need wish to see; and at any time, you know, it's not a fortnight's work, by God's blessing, to rejoin the old friends and true friends, that so often go fishing under your patronage, and tell improbable stories around your table. Wait till I get into my own chair beside you, and I will tell stories of my sojourn in America that will put Harry's Indian romances to the blush. He now goes out with a stock of prairie-adventures, that out-Sinbad Sinbad, and yet he tells them with an air of honesty that would gull Gulliver. Wait till I rejoin you, and you shall see how a plain tale will put him down.
Yours, &c.
THE TIMES OF GEORGE II.[18]
Female authorship is beginning to flourish in England. To this employment no rational objection can be raised. The want of occupation for female life in the higher classes has long been a subject of complaint, and any honest change which removes it will be a change for the better. The quantity of time and thread which has been wasted on chainstitch, and roundstitch, and all the other mysteries of the needle, in the last three centuries, is beyond all calculation. If the fair artists had been workers at the loom, they might have clothed half the living population in "fine linen," if not in purple. If they had been equally diligent in brickmaking, they might have built ten Babels; or if they had devoted similar energies, on Iago's hint, "to suckle fools, and chronicle small beer," they might have tripled the population, or anticipated the colossal vats of Messrs Truman & Co. What myriads of young faces have grown old over worsted parrots and linsey-wolsey maps of the terrestrial globe! What exquisite fingers have been thinned to the bone, in creating carnations to be sat upon, and cowslip beds for the repose of favourite poodles! What bright eyes have been reduced to spectacles, in the remorseless fabrication of patchwork, quilts and flowery footstools for the feet of gouty gentlemen! Nay, what thousands and tens of thousands have been flung into the arms of their only bridegroom, Consumption, leaving nothing to record their existence but an accumulation of trifles, which cost them only their health, their tempers, their time, their charms, and their usefulness!
But the age of knitting and tambour passed away. The spinning-jenny was its mortal enemy. The most inveterate of fringemakers, the most painstaking devotee of patchwork, when she found that Arkwright could make in a minute more than with all her diligence she could make in a month, and that old Robert Peel could pour out figured muslins, by a twist of a screw, sufficient to give gowns to the whole petticoat population of England, had only to give in; the spinsterhood were forced to feel that their "occupation was o'er."
Even then, however, the female fingers were not suffered to "forget their cunning;" and the age of purse-making began. The land was inundated with purses of every shape, size, and substance. Then followed another change. The Berlin manufacturers had contrived to bring back the age of worsted wonders, though, by a happy art, they saved the fair artists all the trouble of drawing and design. We are still under a Gothic invasion of trimmings and tapestry, of needlework nondescripts, moonlight minstrels in canvass, playing under cross-bar balconies; and all the signs of the zodiac brought down to the level of the ivory fingers of womankind.
To this, we must acknowledge, that the incipient taste of the ladies for historical publications, for diving into the trunks of family memorials, and giving us those private correspondences which are to be found only by the desperate determination to find something and every thing, is a fortunate turn of the wheel.
It is true, that England boasts of many distinguished female writers; that the works of Mrs Radcliffe opened a new vein of rich description and solemn mystery; that the comedies of Inchbald netted her innocent and persevering spirit some thousand pounds; and that Joanna Baillie's tragedies entitle her to an enduring fame. We also acknowledge, with equal sincerity and gratification, the merits of many of our female novelists in the past half century; their keen insight into character, their close anatomy of the general impulses of the human heart, and the mingled delicacy and force with which they seize on personal peculiarities, belong to woman alone. But their day, too, has gone down. They were first rivalled by the "high-life novel," the most vulgar of all earthly caricatures. They are now extinguished by the low-life novel; the most intolerable of all earthly realities. The true novel, true in its fidelity to nature, polished without affectation, and vigorous without rudeness, now sleeps in the grave, and must sleep, until posterity shall, with one voice, demand its revival.
Yet, until another race of genius shall arise, and the laurel of Fielding or of Shakspeare shall descend on our female authors, we must be grateful for their gentle labours in the rather rugged field of history.