review of them once, and gave the idea of a very puerile,
ridiculous, apron-stringy attempt at poetry. Whoever wrote
that notice ought to be shot, for the books are charming,--
pure and homely and householdy, yet not effeminate. Critics
may sneer as much as they choose: it is such love as Vaughan's
that Honorias value. Because a woman's nature is not proof
against deterioration, because a large and long-continued
infusion of gross blood, and perhaps even the monotonous
pressure of rough, pitiless, degrading circumstances, may
displace, eat out, rub off the delicacy of a soul, may change
its texture to unnatural coarseness and scatter ashes for
beauty, women do exist, victims rather than culprits, coarse
against their nature, hard, material, grasping, the saddest
sight humanity can see. Such a woman can accept coarse men.
They may come courting on all fours, and she will not be
shocked. But women in the natural state wish men to stand
godlike erect, to tread majestically, and live delicately.
Women do not often make an ado about this. They talk it over
among themselves, and take men as they are. They quietly
soften them down, and smooth them out, and polish them up, and
make the best of them, and simply and sedulously shut their
eyes and make believe there isn't any worst, or reason it
away,--a great deal more than I should think they would. But
if you see the qualities that a woman spontaneously loves, the
expression, the tone, the bearing that thoroughly satisfies her
self-respect, that not only secures her acquiescence, but
arouses her enthusiasm and commands her abdication, crucify the
flesh, and read Coventry Patmore. Not that he is the world's
great poet, nor Arthur Vaughan the ideal man; but this I do
mean: that the delicacy, the spirituality of his love, the