but did not. Such post-graduate study, I venture to think, so far from being encouraged, ought to be rendered impossible. Sometimes, again, the word seems to be used as if a post-graduate school were a sort of finishing school, a means of giving a polish to the student as he comes rough-hewn out of the examination, and so of making him more presentable. If such is the meaning, the matter is one not urgently needing care and thought. I trust it is neither of these. The post-graduate study which alone, to my mind, calls for strenuous support is that study which fits the student for the task of inquiring after new truth, of grappling not with the known, but with the unknown. Such a training ought, it is true, to be begun even in the studies leading to a degree; but the efforts of the teacher in this direction, however able he may be, are always trammelled by the various contingencies attaching to the conferring of a degree. The degree once gained, these contingencies ought no longer to affect the teaching; the studies of the graduate ought to be wholly directed towards fitting him to use the truths which have been gathered in, and with which he previously had been mainly busied, as a means of laying hold of some of the multitude of truths yet hidden from man's ken; they should lead him from the drill-camp into the battle-field, where he will have to struggle with the demands not of examiners but of Nature.

Such post-graduate study needs no special seat, no particular, isolated installation. Not only can it be carried on in company with ordinary teaching, but it can be more efficiently carried on than when left to itself. In every scientific laboratory the duties of the head of the laboratory (and the same may be said of each of his chief assistants) are threefold: to teach the beginner what is known, to carry on his own researches into the unknown, and to train those who are no longer beginners in the way of inquiring after new truth. The last duty, though often the least in respect to the amount of time and labour which it demands, is by no means the least in respect to the effects which it may have on the advancement of knowledge. And the due discharge of each of the three helps that of the other two.

If there be any truth in what I am now urging, each of our great hospitals, with its wards and with the scientific equipment on which I have insisted, is in reality a scientific, a medical laboratory, the output of which consists on the one hand in the healing of the sick, and on the other in the increase of knowledge, the two being indissolubly joined together. Here in London we can assert beyond dispute that the staff of the laboratory is performing admirably two of the three duties of which I just spoke; it is training the beginner, it is pursuing fruitfully its own researches. Is it equally performing the third duty, that of training the graduate to inquire?

During a recent stay in the United States of America and in

Canada I was told, not once only but again and again, that in the experiences of their medical graduates visiting London, while our ordinary medical teaching the teaching up to graduation-is unsurpassed in excellence, our hospitals, our general hospitals, are of little use to the graduate, and that the special hospitals do not supply him with what he needs. He seeks for some such post-graduate study as that which I have sketched out, but seeks for it in vain.

It was indeed by what I heard over the water that I was led to the thoughts which I have here laid before the reader. And I ask him seriously to consider whether or no I am right in asserting, as I have done, that the opportunities for the advancement of medical knowledge offered by our great hospitals are not fully made use of, and that a development of post-graduate study as a training in medical research would be to the great benefit not only of our visitors but also of our own graduates, and lastly, though not least, of our patients.

M. FOSTER.

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY

I. IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE
II. IN NINFTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

II

We must now turn to the English compeers of the French women of the seventeenth century. Here, till we get to the crucial point of the comparison, we shall find the task of sustaining the interest somewhat difficult. For it cannot be denied that the French women of the seventeenth century were more interesting than the ancestors of the Englishwomen of the eighteenth. During the epochs under notice, the eighteenth century in France and the nineteenth in England, the charm as in the seventeenth century remains with France until we get to the end of both centuries, when the likeness between the women of the two centuries became very close. At their best the English of the eighteenth century seem to be too nearly a replica of their French contemporaries to be very arresting; but it is worth considering how a certain view of tradition derived from the latter can be traced to the end of the nineteenth century. There is also the temptation to linger over contemporary letters and memoirs, of which we have a good supply. Horace Walpole, dealing out his criticism and sharpening his wit on Lady Mary W. Montagu's ugly manners and Lady Craven's spitefulness, brings into full light many details of these ladies' lives they little guessed would ever see the light. This rather adds to the pleasure of reading what they carefully prepared for publication, for one does so with a liberal discount. There are moments when Lady Mary fearlessly exposes the follies of foreign Courts. One foundation of these everlasting disputes,' she writes, 'turns entirely upon rank, place, and the title of Excellency;' and in other letters she gives a graphic description of the follies and futilities of English society, concerning which she seems to show more insight than her celebrated censor. And the same may be said of Lady Craven, who, however, was by no means on the same level as her rival; but if she failed, as Horace Walpole said she did, to understand Lady Mary's best points, she was her equal in accurate delineation. For instance, in her letters to the

Margrave of Anspach, whom she afterwards married, she speaks of the misrule of the unspeakable Turk, of the discomfort and absurd ceremonials of the small Italian Courts; and the whole of her correspondence is seasoned with a fine insular savour of admiration for British freedom and British comfort, expressed in forcible and epigrammatic terms. Horace Walpole might, with his exaggeration and cosmopolitanism and his surrender through old Madame du Deffand, to French influence, almost have envied Lady Craven. And so it was with others in the same Society-Lady Cowper, Mrs. Montague, and a long way after them Mrs. West and others. They give one the same impression of possessing considerable cultivation and fine manners, but with stilted tediousness. Of the vein of Puritanism which had certainly permeated the middle class and the more retired upper class, as is shown in Rachel Lady Russell's and Lady Herbert's letters, &c., traces, as we have noticed, still remain in English Society. But it takes the light and air out of the subject, and confirms the impression that neither by way of contrast nor of likeness can the women of the eighteenth century in France be compared with those of the same epoch in England.

Before we reach our friends of to-day we must give a glance at their immediate predecessors, their mothers and grandmothers; and the experience of anyone with half a century's experience ought to be useful in helping us to see Society in the first part of this century as it really was. The great Whig Houses had much to say in the training of the smart world of those days. The traditions of perfect manners, lax morality, political shrewdness, excellence of taste, unrivalled skill in holding a salon, were handed down from mother to daughter, till the ebb of the tide set in during the fifties; then it is curious to observe the decline of each of these traditions. Who does not remember, if he is old enough, the courtesy without patronage, the gentleness to inferiors, the rigorous but perfectly natural bearing, which never failed, however morality or religion might fare in the days of his grandmothers? When I was a child it appeared to me impossible to believe that there could be any other way of getting old but that with which I was familiar. But, full of point and amusement as were her sayings, merciless as she was to false fine ladyism, swift and cutting as were her caustic, witty snubs to both old and young, yet I feel when I look back that old Lady G- - must have been a milder reproduction of the preceding generation; for the disintegrating forces of the French Revolution were at work in England, and a woman whose husband knew his Voltaire and Rousseau by heart found the Whig edition of liberalism strongly tinged with ideas which could revolutionise in a bloodless way the exclusive aristocratic upper classes; while the middle classes were protected by the Puritan influence from this disturbing agent.

VOL. XLIX-No. 287.

F

And so it came about that the puzzled, restless phase which came over French society at the end of the eighteenth century began to undermine English society in the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth in a dull respectable way; manners became democratised, salons lost their prestige because the entertainer no longer believed in herself. Of a group of salons which still held their own fifty years ago, Lady Palmerston's was the most successful and the most powerful politically, because the widest and the most cosmopolitan. Her charm and great distinction were unhampered by any shade of strictness. She had a delightful naïveté in the choice of her political agents that would make us smile now. 'I think,' she would say, 'I shall send the Flea to Rotten Row (a certain little Mr. Fleming, who had the art de se faufiler partout), to report to me what the feeling of the country is on last night's debate.' Her two daughters, Lady Shaftesbury and the incomparably witty Lady Jocelyn, helped her not a little.

Lady Granville's salon was of a different sort-more exclusive, much more affected, and frequented by foreigners. She had the French gift of receiving without effort. Sitting at work with a shaded lamp near her, she would call out with a word from among those passing through to the tea-room a friend with whom she wished to talk, and one always longed to hear what she was saying, for the friend on the sofa looked very happy and much amused; even 'the lodger,' Charles Greville, who lived on the floor above in Bruton Street, thawed in that corner. Of course, there was the immense advantage of the presence of the master of the house, who, with his wonderful instinct for society, rapidly arranged and rearranged groups, so that a bore, if such were admitted by mistake, found himself neutralised by being handed to someone fully capable of dealing with him. Lady Palmerston, Lady Granville, and Lady Holland may be said to be the last charming mondaines convaincues, who never doubted what they should do and say to maintain their power. They sometimes indulged in an inner circle of intimate (small) dinners and tails to dinners, but, on the whole, devoted themselves mainly to the interest of the party,' and received all--and a very long list it was-with the most perfect manner, which was simply no manner at all. Each guest, young and old, left the house with the conviction that special attention and marked sympathy had been shown to him.

The later attempts to fill this rôle, the grande dame holding a salon, were not successful. Strawberry Hill had in Frances Lady Waldegrave's reign a reputation of its own. As a country house it was an amusing one to go to, though her receptions were a little too much of a scramble for it to be distinguished in its façon d'étre. The generous qualities of the hostess and the mixed character of her guests made up a whole which, as a feature of the epoch, has a special value. Yet, as a salon held by a grande dame, it was beside