Yet still within the fountain pool,
    The gold fish steer and swim,
  As when King Charles with jewelled hand
    Stood paddling at the brim;
  At Charing-cross he's safe in bronze,
    No danger more from him!

  Yet still in lonely evening hours,
    When the moon has long gone in,
  You hear the fountain's ceaseless tears,
    As for some hopeless sin;
  And far without the nightingale
    Of past grief warbling.

THE WOMAN QUESTION IN BLACK
LETTER.

THE woman question has always been
one of the legal and social difficulties of
Christendom. In times when might was
right, and the weakest went to the wall,
women were simply the prey of the
strongest; and though chivalry was
instituted as much to protect them as for the
maintenance of knightly exercises, they
were nevertheless but poorly championed
against the brutality of men and the
oppression of laws, and for the most part were
treated, as they were regarded, like inferiors
and chattels. By degrees more generous
counsels prevailed, the woman question
came in for a share of the more liberal
feeling afloat, the legal rights of women
were enlarged on the ground of abstract
justice, and not merely because women were
the wives and mothers of men.

A curious old black-letter book,* professing
to be the "woman's lawyer," sets forth
their legal condition as well as the state of
public feeling regarding them in Queen
Elizabeth's time. The statement why the
book was written at all, has that strange non-
sequitur flavour in it to be found in much old
reasoning. "Before the world was seven
daies old, masculum et fœminam fecit eos, of
which division because the first part that
wee say hath least judgement and discretion
to be a Lawe unto it selfe (women,
onely women), they have nothing to do in
constituting Lawes or consenting to them,
in interpreting of Lawes, or in hearing them
interpreted at Lectures, leets, or charges;
and yet they stand strictly tyed to men's
establishments, little or nothing excused by
ignorance, mee thinks it were pitty and
impiety any longer to hold from them such
Customes, Lawes, and Statutes as in a
manner proper or principally belonging
unto them." Speaking of men and women
being only one, and of the consequent
merging of the woman in the man, the
anonymous author says: "A married woman
perhaps may either doubt whether she bee
either none or no more than half a person.
But let her bee of good cheare;" for many
affairs in life she will be found a whole
person, and to be dealt with accordingly.
Again, with a prophetic glance onward at
the Miss Beckers and the Revising Barristers
of the future, he says: "Women have
no voyse in Parliament. They make no
Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate
none. All of them are understood either
married or to bee married, and their desires
are subject to their husband. I know no
remedy, though some women can shift it
well enough. The Common Law here
shaketh hands with Divinitie, but because
I am come too soone to the title of Baron
and feme, and Adam and Eve were the first
and last that were married so young, it is
best that I runne back again to consider of
the things (which I might seeme to have
lost by the way) that are fit to bee known
concerning women before they bee fit for
marriage." And the first thing to be
known is the age at which they may be
married.

* The Lawes Resolutions of Woman's Rights, or the
Lawes Provision for Women. Printed by the Assignment
of John More, Esquire. 1622.

Now, it appears that a woman has "divers
special ages" in the matters of marriage and
guardianship, and they are these:— the chief
thing that strikes us when we read them,
being the wonderful precocity of those
times. At seven years of age, her father
shall have aid of his tenants to marry her;
at nine, she is able to deserve and have
dower; at twelve, to consent to marriage;
at fourteen, to be hors du gard; at sixteen,
to be past the Lord's tender of a husband
(that is, free to choose for herself, and not
obliged to take a husband of his choosing),
also free to enter into the enjoyment of her
own lands, if the Lord, for covetousness
did not marry her at fourteen; at twenty-
one, she is able to make a feoffment. But
mark well this clause: if she misbehaves
herself in any light way, while still a ward,
she is to be deprived of her heritage, and
her portion is to go to her parceners.

At the age of fourteen a woman was
held to be marriageable, because able to
"order and dispose, to have the key clog
at her girdle, and to be a jolly stay to a
man;" which was beginning early enough,
in all conscience! But yet another reason
for these early marriages was that, if
married, "her husband for her shall do knight's
service" if he is above age; if he is still
under age, she is still in ward. But the
black-letter lawyer is very warm on this