Atalanta Volume 7

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 Excerpt: ...of the time were striving for. All the missiles of scorn were thrown at it, boundless ridicule, derision which had no limits either of taste or temper. These were much stronger than any arguments that could be brought to bear against it: but even they were silenced, or partially silenced, and perhaps brought more or less to the shame that was their due. And the cause--which was a good cause and in its ideal a perfectly worthy thing--was triumphant, as it had a right to be. I hear of a very different ideal now: it is hard to believe in it as a fact, and still harder to allow that the one of twenty years ago has anything to do with the other. There is but one step we know from the sublime to the ridiculous: but from the depths of silly vulgarity to the height of a reasonable and worthy ambition seems too great for any stride we know of. Seven-leagued boots are not large enough for such a step. The girl of this period, it appears, has her grievances as the other girl had before the age of Girton: but they are of a totally different kind. Her grievance is that she cannot go out alone, as her brother does, to a music hall in the evening: that she cannot return alone through the London streets at any hour she pleases with a latchkey, or to, what would be better, independent lodgings of her own: that, in short, she is not a young man in the most foolish particulars of a young man's career, but a girl with a different set of circumstances surrounding her. This is a very different sort of thing from the desire for Higher Education. Many good people are willing to make sacrifices, to give themselves a great deal of trouble for the latter: does anybody think the music-hall and the latchkey things worth fighting for, or realities at all except as affording a subject fo...