Woman’s world’s a stage,
  And modern women will be ill-cast players;
  They’ll have new exits and strange entrances,
  And one She will play many mannish parts,
  And these her Seven Ages.  First the infant
  “Grinding” and “sapping” in its mother’s arms,
  And then the pinched High-School girl, with packed satchel,
  And worn anaemic face, creeping like cripple
  Short-sightedly to school.  Then the “free-lover,”
  Mouthing out IBSEN, or some cynic ballad
  Made against matrimony.  Then a spouter,
  Full of long words and windy; a wire-puller,
  Jealous of office, fond of platform-posing,
  Seeking that bubble She-enfranchisement
  E’en with abusive mouth.  Then County-Councillor,
  Her meagre bosom shrunk and harshly lined,
  Full of “land-laws” and “unearned increment”;
  Or playing M.P. part.  The sixth age shifts
  Into the withered sour She-pantaloon,
  With spectacles on nose and “Gamp” at side,
  Her azure hose, well-darned, a world too wide
  For her shrunk shanks; her once sweet woman’s voice,
  Verjuiced to Virgin-vinegarishness,
  Grates harshly in its sound.  Last scene of all,
  That ends this strange new-fangled history,
  Is sheer unwomanliness, mere sex-negation—­
  Sans love, sans charm, sans grace, sans everything.

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[Illustration:  A BIRD OF PREY.]

[Despite the laudable endeavours of “The Society for the Protection of Birds,” the harpy Fashion appears still, and even increasingly, to make endless holocausts of small fowl for the furnishing forth of “feather trimmings” for the fair sex.  We are told that to obtain the delicate and beautiful spiral plume called the “Osprey,” the old birds “are killed off in scores, while employed in feeding their young, who are left to starve to death in their nests by hundreds.”  Their dying cries are described as “heartrending.”  But they evidently do not rend the hearts of our fashionable ladies, or induce them to rend their much-beplumed garments.  Thirty thousand black partridges have been killed in certain Indian provinces in a few days’ time to supply the European demand for their skins.  One dealer in London is said to have received, as a single consignment, 32,000 dead humming-birds, 80,000 aquatic birds, and 800,000 pairs of wings.  We are told too that often “after the birds are shot down, the wings are wrenched off during life, and the mangled bird is left to die slowly of wounds, thirst, and starvation.”]

* * * * *

ART IN THE CITY.

(A SKETCH IN THE CORPORATION GALLERY AT THE GUILDHALL.)