The Sun.
London, England, 1862-06-12 00:00:00

perial schoolmaster, arrives at Rome in the midst of
the fete, and the EMPEROR, resolves to have a new
election of his Legislative Assembly. So little does
he fear the effect of adding a score of guardian
Saints to the protectols of the Vatican. It must
also have occurred to even the least observant of the
Assembly, that the French protectors of Papal
temporalities are now reduced to one Brigade—a
Brigade soon, perhaps, to sail for Mexico.

It is now sixteen years since Lord GEORGE BEN-
TINCIK, in one of his earliest speeches in the House

of Commons, raised a good-humoured laugh against
himself by avowing his earnest wish to witness the
installation in Downing-street of " a stable Govern-
ment." Falling from Ms lips, the phrase bore
about it so whimsical a construction ! Upon the
very morrow of the day upon which the words fell
from the lips of the noble lord, the late member for
King's Lynn, we remember having ourselves first
directed public attention in these columns to what,
remembering Lord GEORGE'S antecedents, might
almost be said to have amounted to a lapsus linguce.
The laughter provoked by that somewhat unlucky
expression, employed as it was at a moment when
that noble and gallant scion of the House of Rut-
land, that Preux Chevalier of the expiring lance of
the Protectionists wished to be at his gravest—
wished to impress the House by the solemnity of
an almost pathetic utterance—the laughter, we
say, thus unwittingly provoked did not speedily
die out. It was echoed far and wide throughout
the country. Lord GEORGE BENTINCK did not soon
hear the last of it.

Just now in a somewhat similar plight is Mr.
WALPOLE. The Right Hon. Gentleman, by rea-
son of his astounding withdrawal of the Amend-
ment entrusted to his care by his Party
—its withdrawal, as one may say, at the
eleventh hour and three-quarters, upon the eve of
" The Derby"—has given rise (on his part most
unintentionally and undesignedly) to a series of
jokes at his expense, as—in the words affixed to the
famous caricature—" The Man Wot didn't "—bring
the DERBY Government in ! Mr. DISRAELI him-
self was the first of the great parliamentary joke-
masters to raise the laugh rather cruelly against his
late right hon. colleague. The Leader of the Oppo-
sition, with his usual serio-comic air at these times,
with raised eyebrows, and a countenance expressive
of affected dejection, appealing to the sympathy of
his hearers upon that momentous Eve of " The
Derby " for all such as might have the lamentable
ill-luck to behold, just at the crisis
of the great race their chosen Favourite—bolting !
The humorous member for Liskeard, however,
almost immediately afterwards topped the happiest
joker of them all, by his exquisitely ludicrous sug-
gestion in regard to that carefully selected Favourite
of the Conservative Opposition, not so much that
he was afflicted with the vice of Bolting as that
" somebody had got at him." Those who had wit-
nessed the whispered confabulation that had been
going on just before the startling withdrawal of Mr.
WALPOLE'S Amendment on the 3d inst.—the whis-
pered "asides" that had been exchanged between
the right hon. gentleman and some of the more
crotchetty members of the Opposition recalcitrants,
such as Mr. BENTINCK and others—best appreci-
ated upon the instant the full force of Mr. Os-
BORNE'S ridiculous but most felicitous suggestion as
to the real cause of what had just then happened.

Another amusing commentary of a similar char-
acter has just now been thrown out upon the same
grotesque incident by another member of her Ma-
jesty's Opposition. Upon the occasion of a Con-
servative demonstration -which took place on
, Friday evening at Maldon, Mr. Du CANE thus
facetiously remarked, in regard to Mr. WALPOLE'S
certainly eccentric and to some extent still incom-
prehensible proceedings :—"lf," said the hon. gen-
tleman, " I may venture, in these days of Ascot and
the Derby, to use for a moment the language of the
turf, I would say that in my humble opinion the train-
ers of our Conservative stable committed a slight mis-
take in entering a horse at all for the ' amendment
race,' and that they committed another an 3 far more
serious error in the choice of the jockey they selected
to ride him. We all of us know that, according to
the laws of the turf, if you have entered a horse for
a race, and you have reason to doubt the quality of
his four legs, you may always scratch him up to the
moment of starting ; but when the starting flag has
been lowered, and the race is fairly commenced, if
your jockey deliberately throws himself off, it is
somewhat apt to shake public confidence in the
honesty of the stableman." It is Mr. OSBORNE'S
thought again—only differently expressed. All
that there is now left for the right hon. member for
Cambridge University to do, is to bear the laugh
that he has excited against himself as best he may.
He cannot possibly hush it up. The laugh must
be laughed out. Mr. WALPOLE has appealed
to the risibility of all too directly to allow of its
suppression. What lent especial poignancy to the
absolute absurdity of his proceedings on the 3d
instant in the House of Commons, was his exag-
gerated and almost, one might say, awful solemnity
of look, and voice, and delivery, in rising to explain
to the House his withdrawal of the Amendment.
The House will not easily forget what it then wit-
nessed. The incident will long survive in its recol-
lection. And it is certainly one in no way calcu-
lated to enhance its hitherto high estimate of Mr.
WALPOLE'S dignity either in debate or in state-
manship.
Turning from a consideration of Mr. WALPOLE
and his cushioned Amendment, Mr. Du CANE, upon
the occasion we are referring to, that is, on Tuesday
evening, down at Maldon, happily enough
reprobated our present system of war-
like expenditure in a time of peace as
an egregious persistence among the nations in play-
ing out a ruinous game of " beggar my neigh-
bour." We certainly cannot see the force of another
lok
he eirbttelosfre:h:::e:byorthe way, however—namely, where
a frivolous laugh among his Conservative
hearers down at Maldon, by deriding Mr. COBDEN'S
his diplomatic services to induce
the Empeto,
of the FRENCH to consent to a dis-
iwahoutlbde tabkeettMerr.theeonß DbEoNthfafiorrlyFartanhcies
I armament." would that, in serious truth, the
wGoorvderlnmletnmt
and for England.

The ladies on the ladies—hcm
can
We overlook
such a topic ? When they discuss Ito°rinatory Edu-
cation, when they present papers on how
to employ
the 600,000 of their sex who cannot .
'll7, ua these
islands, which permit not double blessedness to any
man, we listen to them with respectful attention.
But when, like Miss FRANCES COBBE, they come
forward and teal us how they may make themselves
yet " more of women," and of yet more worth to
us all, we are dubious. Let not Miss COBBE look
frowningly—our doubts are all to the credit of the
ladies as they are. It is hard for us to wish to
change them. We look at our chosen ones—we
who have only made our choice as yet, and we
who have sealed it many years ago at the altar—
and can Miss COBBE be displeased with us if we
question the possibility of change for the better,
Miss COBBE may tell us that she could turn our
angels into archangels—but we shrink, almost,
from the thought ; with our. angels we have grown

familiar; to exalt them to archangels would be to
make them a little too awful for ordinary mortals.
And then again, should Miss COBBE persuade us
that archangels would be as pleasant testable com•
panions as angels, and yet far more potent in some
respects for the family welfare, she makes a demand
upon us which requires some disinterestedness.
We ourselves should derive little of the benefit.
Our lot and that of our sons and daughters who
are come of age, is fixed. It is our lasses under
twelve or fifteen at most, who must undergo the
exalting process. It is the generation whom we
shall look upon as we are leaving life, who are to
be blessed with women and wives such as England
has never yet beheld. Those amongst us who have
such young daughters she would remind that
we surely wished to do the best for them ;
and we hope we should not deny this. But then
would come our request, in return, to be assured
that what she proposed was the beet. It might be
so; but then the old predilection, just adverted to,
for our ladies, as we have them, would steal over us,
and we should ask to be permitted to think over at
leisure all the more important points in her argu-
ments. We should instinctively fear whatever
threatened to make our young daughters too much
unlike their mothers.

If we leap at once to Miss COBBE'S chief practical
proposal, we may be sure that the great majority
of our male readers would at once hold up their
hands in astonishment. It is nothing less than
opening University examinations to our girls, and
training them to pass ! Miss COBBE must not be
surprised to learn that most of the young men would
at once exclaim, let me have one of those who stuck
in mathematics, or Greek, or Latin. Miss COBBE
will tell us that this, which we are apt to think an
instinct, is neither more nor less than an ignorant
prejudice. This part of her argument is thus con-
densed in one report of her paper :—" A classical
education did not make a woman masculine. It was
as absurd to teach a girl French because a boy
learned Latin, as to make her eat mutton because
the boy ate beef. The assimilation of mental and
bodily food both suited the natural constitution. A
woman's mind is made by the CREATOR wholly
different from that of a man, and in everything she
does, art, learning, or philanthropic labour, these
differences come out. She works not like a man,
from without, by force of will and legislative power,
but from within, by persuading and inspiring. To
educate a woman to the utmost is only more and
more to educe her womanliness; to make her more,
not less, a woman. A sound and solid education is
even more needful for her than for a man, her
natural quickness leading her to shallowness and
hastiness of conclusions."

How can we refute such arguments ? Indeed,
we have no wish to refute them. Miss COBBE her-
self is quite aware of the argument which, if not
mentioned, yet, in reality, makes her own secretly
suspected, for she " begged both men and women
to put aside the prejudices which the obnoxious and
ludicrous ideas attached to that popular ogress the
strong-minded female, brought upon all subjects
connected with the claims of women. She would
rather have the sex remain in Beeotian ignorance
than assist in the multiplication of the strong-
minded woman ;' but she again maintained that no
system of education could remove the difference
between the natures of man and women, which de-
pended not on accidental circumstances, but on the
instincts implanted in them by the Creator." The
audience seemed to listen to the paper with unusual
interest, and to have greeted it with hearty applause.
We may well suppose, therefore, that whether the
London University open its examinations or not,
Miss COBBE has made some converts, and that
mothers, and perhaps fathers, will have returned
home to try the recommendations of the clever lee•
turer.

And surely there is a great deal to say for them.
When the power to read and write was a singular
acquisition for a female servant, she felt it to be a
distinction which often made her almost as unplea-
sant in the kitchen as the "strong-minded woman"
is in the social circle. But already the reading and
writing servant feels herself no wonder, though not
long ago she did as much as anything to create
a prejudice against popular education ; and if a
more solid education were customary for girls
of the middle classes and upwards, the distinction
of strong-minded women, and the temptation to
display the supposed strength offensively, might
vanish together. What, then, would be the effect
on girls of being fed with the same educational diet
as boys ? Miss COBBE would say they would be
girls still, and as much so as ever. Original differ-
ences of mental temperament would develop them-
selves as strongly as ever, whatever the instruction.
Partaking daily of the same family meals does not
interfere with the different muscular and general
development of the sexes ; why should the same
mental food not nourish equally well the female
and the male intellect ? The lily and the rose flou-
rish side by side in the nursery ground with the
young oak and pine.

I Well, all this may be so. We half incline to the
belief ourselves that had not custom made a certain
course of education feminine and another masculine,
we might never have supposed that any amount of
such school teaching as we give our boys would
spoil our girls and eventually our women. We, too,
should deny that a cultivated woman was likely to
be a less good wife and mother than an ignorant
one, or that, as SYDNEY SMITH said, " a woman's
love for her children depended on her ignorance of
Greek, and that she would he likely to desert
an infant for a quadratic equation." Feminine
instinct is too strong to be destroyed by even
inappropriate education, but it would not be easy
to prove that a generally more solid education
for girls would be inappropriate. The difficulty,
we apprehend, would be to adjust the claims of
what have acquired the name of " accomplish-
ments." While these—Miss COBBE must forgive
us the sentence—while these have the preference
in the " matrimonial market," her arguments will
tell but little practically. And, somehow, the
husband is apt to prefer his wife's having made
pleasing acquisitions in which there can be no
rivalry with his own, or which do not, it may
be, qualify her to detect that his exercises were
done for him at school, and that he passed with
the " pol" at the University. We must conclude
with the Chairman of the section, by saying that if
we had the power of conferring degrees, we should
be most happy to propose that Miss COBBE receive
from us the degree of M.A.—mistress of the art of
discussing a subject with sound reason, with infi-
nite grace, and with perfect propriety.

BURIALS BILL.—Sir M. Peto's Burial Bill has
been considerably altered by the select committee. The bill
now begins with a clause providing that the parish clergy-
man, if required by " the relative having the conduct of the
funeral" of any person entitled to burial in the parish, must
grant permission for the burial to take place without any
service at all; this appears to be an adaptation of the prin-
ciple of marriages before a registi ar. Upon the application
also of this
"relative having the conduct of the funeral,"
the clergyman may, if he think fit, grant permission to the
minister of any religious denomination to perform at the
graves burial service other than that of the Church of
England, but a proviso is now added—" that such service,
holy Scripture." If the
_
if not according to a published ritual, shall consist only of
prayers, hymns, or extracts from holypermission is refused, the clergyman must state his reasons
to the bishop's registrar, who is to transmit the statement
"both consecrated
them he Home Secretary. A clause has been added, providing
and unconsecrated uwnhceorneseacraptuebdligcrcoeumtp.'"Ytheirtbiallirias not to authorise the
service 111 the consecrated ground.
use 04 a new burial