considered superfluous for a female. Moreover, the child's early application to her books was regarded with great disfavor by her relatives, who plainly thought that no good was likely to come of it. "I wonder," said her rigid aunt to Lady Fairfax, "that you let Mary waste her time in reading!"
"You cannot hammer a girl into anything," says Ruskin, who has constituted himself both champion and mentor of the sex; and perhaps this was the reason that so many of these rigorously drilled and kept-down girls blossomed perversely into brilliant and scholarly women. Nevertheless, it is comforting to turn back for a moment, and see what Holland, in the seventeenth century, could do for her clever children. Mr. Gosse has shown us a charming picture of the three daughters of Roemer Visscher, the poetess Tesselschade and her less famous sisters,—three little girls, whose healthy mental and physical training was happily free from either narrow contraction or hot-house pressure. "All of them," writes Ernestus Brink, "were practiced in very sweet accomplishments. They could play music, paint, write, and engrave on glass, make
