504

THE CONGRESS OE WOMEN.

joint was carried up to her in turn to be operated upon by her alone. No peer or knight could offer his assistance, and the master of the house had to husband his strength that he might push the bottle after dinner. Though she could not have a teacher in Latin, she was provided with a professional master in carving. She took lessons three times a week that she might be perfect on her father’s great days. No doubt her carving master found her a more docile pupil because of her self-acquired Latin.

If Lady Montague excelled her master in the manipulation of a joint, she also excelled Walpole, Cowper and Pope, and other men who stood highest in literary circles. She excelled them in vivacity, ease, sarcasm, elegance and other traits that distinguished letters from essays. While Lady Montague’s writings make a valuable addition to English literature, what she did toward making the medical profession possible for women of the nineteenth century is of greatest value to us. While in the Plast she discovered the Turkish method of inoculation for small-pox. She studied the method carefully, and on her return to England introduced it to her countrymen. What a furore this created! Statesmen forgot for the time the graver matter of legis­lation to criticise and censure a woman for usurping the rights of men. Lawyers doubted the wdsdom of such an innovation. Doctors shook their wise heads and gave warning against such a heathenish practice. Ministers preached against Lady Mon­tague and her method of warding off disease, her boldness and wdckedness in taking such matters from the hand of God. But she persevered, though she declared she could never have undertaken it could she have foreseen the vexation, the oppression, the obliquy even, that it brought upon her. She opened the w 7 ay into the medical profession for women, and made it possible for her to practice therein wdthout moles­tation. We cherish her memory, and place her name high among the notable women of the eighteenth century.

Before the eighteenth century, as has been said, education w r as for the titled classes. Jane Austen w r as fortunate in being born at the right time. She did not come of a noble family, but she w r as well born and w 7 ell connected. She was accustomed from youth to meeting people of distinction and eminence, and she had reason always to feel that her kindred played a real part in the world. She was well educated according to the requirements of that time, though she could not have passed an examination to enter any lady’s college, or had the remotest chance w'ith the Harvard Annex or the University of Chicago. But she is a fine example of the cultivation and refinement attainable before women’s colleges were thought of. She grew to woman­hood in gentle obscurity, her individual existence lost in the noisy claims of her brothers. But the germ of great thought \\ r a.s in her, and she gave expression to her thoughts in story as beautiful as was ever w'ritten or told. She was a girl that never had a love story to tell in which she w 7 as the heroine. As free from sentimentality as anyone could be, yet she was a born novelist, and a remarkably sw r eet and loving and lovable woman. She w 7 as not a story-teller merely—she v 7 as an artist. She painted pictures as w 7 onderful in unity and completeness as many of the great masters. What real pleasure and satisfaction we have in her books today. And yet she did her w 7 ork so quietly. Her books steal into notice. They brought her but little money, and a modicum of praise w 7 hile she lived, but today they have become classic, and it is the duty of every student of English literature to be more or less acquainted wfith her works. With all her brilliant parts as a writer, she was false to no instinct of woman­hood. She was an accomplished needle-woman, great in satin stitch, giving her friends pretty presents of her own handiwork, and she could carry on the merriest and most interesting conversation over her embroidery or dressmaking. How often is her portrait reproduced in the remarkable women of our day. The possibility of womanly work going hand in hand with genius obtains today, though it is no new thing. Genius and work! How well they harmonized in Jane Austen, and how well in scores of women who are carrying forward this great Exposition. Jane Austen has been an inspiration to many a woman of the nineteenth century. Her spirit is with us.