The weekly clarion. [volume] (Jackson, Miss.) 1863-1882, 1873-02-27
ANCIENT AND MODERN WO-
MEN.
Wisdom in the Past-Happiness in
the Present-GIOry hereafter

George William Curtis, editor of Har-
pers, lecture upon ancient women is thus
epitomized in the Chicago Tribune.
His introduction was a graceful tribute
to the golden age, to which we all look
with interest, and imaginations. The
conduct of SIR Phillip Sidney on the
battlefield was noble, he, said, but not
more so than the gunner at Gettysburg,
who would not have his comrade leave
his gun to bring a drop of water when
he was dying, for fear that the enemy
would take the piece. Horatius' who
kept the bridge, was no greater than the
conductor on the Hudson River Railroad
who stood to his engine till it went down
the chasm. Thermopala is old in history,
but new in newspapers. Leonidas was
repeated many times during the rebellion.
The " Alcibiades" is seen daily in the
streets of New York and of Chicago.
De Medicis are repeated again and
again; there are daily new Romeos, and
even the story of Ulysses is not infre-
quently repeated in the present The
dress of fashionable lady costs no more
than it did three hundred years ago.
Queen Elizabeth had a wardrobe consist
degeneracy now than among the fashion
able people in the time of Queen Anne,
spoken of by Smollett and in the
''Tattler." The speaker had seen in
lobby of legislature not of this State
"a man displaying bank bills, and say
ing that those made the laws. A centu-
airy ago Kings bought statesmen as they
buy joints of meat; Gladstone to-day
stands in Horace Walpole's place
When the simple soul signs for the good
old times, it forgets that there never was
any. In the old times, Maculay said
men died faster in the country air that
now In the worst streets of our cities, and
faster /. the worst streets of our cities
than on the battlefield. The past was
good, the the present is better, and the
future will be best of all, and he is only
dreamer who does not try TO realize the
golden age in the future. The best IL
lustration of the worlds advnce is the re-
spect paid to women, especially in giving
a better education to girls In the time
of Pericles all the studiousness of Young
ladies would have been accepted as a
sign of their shame; for all the learned
women of that time were of an abandoned
class. The glory of Mrs. Somerville,
and modern women of her character, is
greater than that of Aspasia, or even of
the mother of the Gracchi. The young
lady who tried to open a school at Dion,
In France, few hundred years ago, was
mobbed, stoned, and her school closed.
1t was not thought best that woman
should learn, for fear she should loose
her balance, and incline too much toward
the scholars of the time, and put their
husbands to shame. Sydney Smith said:
In 1870, that when he looked around
him be was astonished at the disparity of
eduation between the sexes, and that they
were fit for something better than to tend
to flowers and birds. The Ene woman of
the day is a Hebe, God-descended,
and fit spouse of Hercules. Is Portia.
the swise young Judge" less poetic to
the imagination than Juliet in the bal
cony, murmurming lovein the moonlight.
Our grandmothers were eighty educated,
because our ancestors fhouRht that sirls