The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle. — 1875-03-27 (Stourbridge, West Midlands, England)

XIV. Others would answer with a character in Racine Plaideurs, and estimate sixty as the prime of life. Mr. Buckle said a woman reached her prime between thirty-five and forty, for, though her beauty had then lost the charm of youth, it had acquired that of expression. We might content ourselves with laying down the rule that so soon as youthful manners and youthful L.tmusements become ridiculous the woman who affects them is an old maid. To consider the definitions in their order, in what sense is the old maid a social failure? She has failed of matrimony. It is understood in young ladies' school that it is a young lady's duty to get well married. If she succeeds she takes for three months at least, the first place in every society ; if she fail it is a roe victis. Airs. Oliphant describes a woman whose youth has gone and who is still obliged to think of marrying as a provision, and who goes into society as a laborieus trade and yet cannot stoop low enough, who looks with envy even at the widow clothed in the dignity of a great sorrow. To old maids of this class the stigma does apply. They have failed. Passing to the "superfluous" theory, it involves the uselessness of 500,000 human brains, 500,000 pairs of human hands, 500,000 human minds and hearts. One recollects the masacre of St. Ursula and 11,000 virgins at Cologne, and asks oneself whether their murderers were imbued with some such theory of the inutility of single women. The same disregard for female existence, except as of ministers to male uses, lay at the root of the ancient practice of infanticide. In Scinde, when a female child was born to one of the Princes it was brought to him in Durbar, and if he did not approve of it, it was put under the cushion upon which he sat, and extinguished by the gentle pressure of his paternal weight. But were unmarried women superfluous? In our own country alone, they gave us in literature, Miss Austenliss Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, Harriet Martineau, r rances Power Cobbe. Was El,zabeth Barrett superfluous till she became Mrs. Browning? In science, was Miss Herschell superfluous, whose labours were invaluable to her father and brother? Was the devoted sister of the poet Wordsworth superfluous? In philanthropy, could they count as too many Florence Nightingale, Lady Burdett Coutts, Mary Carpenter, Octavia Hill, and the great sisterhood of nurses of every denomination, under every garb? Could we spare Miss Davies and Miss Buss in education? As to the third view, that expressed by Miss Austen's heroine, no wonder if women who, when their home was broken up by death, first learnt the worth of money became soured by cares and disappointment, and were not all like Miss Bates, described by the same writer, who, though tiresome, chattering, irrelevant, incoherent, with little sense and no beauty, single and poor, "was very much to the taste of everybody." Yes, she won the world by loving-heartedness, bonte. It is more than moral goodness, it is the goodness which diffuses itself outwardly and socially—bounty. La bonM, est /a coquetterie des vieilles femme; and perhaps it is the want of it that makes old bachelors less amiable and less useful, without being more ornamental than old maids. No doubt, marriage was the highest form of life both for men and women, but there are old maids from choice, who, with a genius for friendship, have never experienced love, and of these she repeated the words of the Apostle. ,Tough a sacrament, marriage ,caTio ,t 9 41001* atijn•Litii, 'lower aspect, as 'a " m*1.141;1011 o litunin frailty, instead of as the highest form of companionship. The type of womanhood was taken, not from the women who followed their Master to the foot of the Cross, but from Eve, tempted by the serpent, and in her turn tempting the man to forbidden fruit; and in medheval pictures the serpent is represented with the face of a beautiful woman. Protestantism had rehabilitated marriage, but not woman in the same degree, and she was now looked upon as inferior and ministering to man, and not as an equal being, with equal rights of free development. The conquest of a higher position