CURRENT LITERATURE.
English Girls : their Place and Power. By Mrs. G. S. Reaney, with a Preface by R. W. Dale. (C. Regan Paul and Co.)—This is a small book, intended for the benefit of girls of the middle-class when they leave school. It is written by a lady who has devoted herself in other ways to the welfare of those around her. She is an earnest, thoughtful woman, who seems, without aiming at any very high in- tellectual standard herself, to be able fully to appreciate the higher education which is now more within reach of those for whom she writes. She devotes a chapter to this subject, but her principal and worthy object is not so much to point out this or that as the special line of duty for every girl, but rather, as Mr. Dale remarks in his short preface, to suggest to one and another some often-forgotten, yet obvious truths, and especially to show that the whole being must be truthful and unselfish, before the doing can be worth much, and that the whole course of the being having once set in the right direction, its after-development may, nay, must, be left to individual character and circumstances. We are sorry to observe in the last chapter a slight tendency to reiterate that favourite, but, we believe, unfounded notion that women of greater intellect are necessarily weaker on the domestic side of things than their lesser-minded compeers. On the contrary, given the same amount of right-heartedness, we believe the economy and comfort of the household arrangements of the larger- minded woman can at any time hold their own against those of the lesser-minded one. But there is a question of fitness here, which we cannot pursue farther, and no careful young student of Mrs. Reaney's pages will fall into the mistake of sewing her mnslins with pack- thread, or her carpets with gossamer.
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