Page:Mrs Caudle's curtain lectures.djvu/242

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MRS. CAUDLE'S CURTAIN LECTURES.

have armed weak woman with even one argument in her unequal contest with that imperious creature, man—if we have awarded to a sex, as Mrs. Caudle herself was wont to declare, "put upon from the beginning," the slightest means of defence—if we have supplied a solitary text to meet any one of the manifold wrongs with which woman, in her household life, is continually pressed by her tyrannic taskmaster, man,—we feel that we have only paid back one grain, hardly one, of that mountain of more than gold it is our felicity to owe her.

During the progress of these Lectures, it has very often pained us, and that excessively, to hear from unthinking, inexperienced men— bachelors of course—that every woman, no matter how divinely composed, has in her ichor-flowing veins one drop—"no bigger than a wren's eye"—of Caudle; that Eve herself may now and then have been guilty of a lecture, murmuring it balmily amongst the rose-leaves. It may be so; still, be it our pride never to believe it. NEVER!