shape of your face, the length of your moustache and the pattern of your
cane--all these are very properly regulated for you by laws of fashion,
which you could never dream of breaking. You may break every moral law
there is--or rather, was--and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a
cad, a coward and a fool, in the poor heart and brains of you; but so
long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are
above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for
manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation
for manhood as brains or beauty.

In short, to be a true woman you have only to be pretty and an idiot,
and to be a true man you have only to be brutal and a fool.

From these misconceptions of manliness and womanliness, these
superstitions of sex, many curious confusions have come about. They so
to say, professional differentiation between the sexes had at one time
gone so far that men were credited with the entire monopoly of a certain
set of human qualities, and women with the monopoly of a certain other
set of human qualities; yet every one of these are qualities which one
would have thought were proper to, and necessary for, all human beings
alike, male and female.

In a dictionary of a date (1856) when everything on earth and in heaven
was settled and written in penny cyclopædias and books of deportment, I
find these delicious definitions--

_Manly_: becoming a man; firm; brave; undaunted; dignified; noble;
stately; not boyish or womanish.

_Womanly_: becoming a woman; feminine; as _womanly_ behaviour.