Our duty of editorship is closed. We hope we have honestly fulfilled
the task of selection from a large mass of papers. We could have
presented to the female world a Lecture for Every Night in the year.
Yes,--three hundred and sixty-five separate Lectures! We trust,
however, that we have done enough. And if we 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!
Footnotes:
{1} The author was just 42 when he began the "Caudle Lectures."