And it was a pleasant thought to me, when I glanced lately at the golden deeds of woman in Miss Yonge’s book—­it was a pleasant thought to me, that I could say to myself—­Ah! yes.  These heroines are known, and their fame flies through the mouths of men.  But if so, how many thousands of heroines there must have been, how many thousands there may be now, of whom we shall never know.  But still they are there.  They sow in secret the seed of which we pluck the flower and eat the fruit, and know not that we pass the sower daily in the street; perhaps some humble ill-drest woman, earning painfully her own small sustenance.  She who nurses a bedridden mother, instead of sending her to the workhouse.  She who spends her heart and her money on a drunken father, a reckless brother, on the orphans of a kinsman or a friend.  She who—­But why go on with the long list of great little heroisms, with which a clergyman at least comes in contact daily—­and it is one of the most ennobling privileges of a clergyman’s high calling that he does come in contact with them—­why go on, I say, save to commemorate one more form of great little heroism—­the commonest, and yet the least remembered of all—­namely, the heroism of an average mother?  Ah, when I think of that last broad fact, I gather hope again for poor humanity; and this dark world looks bright, this diseased world looks wholesome to me once more—­because, whatever else it is or is not full of, it is at least full of mothers.

While the satirist only sneers, as at a stock butt for his ridicule, at the managing mother trying to get her daughters married off her hands by chicaneries and meannesses, which every novelist knows too well how to draw—­would to heaven he, or rather, alas! she, would find some more chivalrous employment for his or her pen—­for were they not, too, born of woman?—­I only say to myself—­having had always a secret fondness for poor Rebecca, though I love Esau more than Jacob—­Let the poor thing alone.  With pain she brought these girls into the world.  With pain she educated them according to her light.  With pain she is trying to obtain for them the highest earthly blessing of which she can conceive, namely, to be well married; and if in doing that last, she manoeuvres a little, commits a few basenesses, even tells a few untruths, what does all that come to, save this—­that in the confused intensity of her motherly self-sacrifice, she will sacrifice for her daughters even her own conscience and her own credit?  We may sneer, if we will, at such a poor hard-driven soul when we meet her in society:  our duty, both as Christians and ladies and gentlemen, seems to me to be—­to do for her something very different indeed.

But to return.  Looking at the amount of great little heroisms, which are being, as I assert, enacted around us every day, no one has a right to say, what we are all tempted to say at times—­“How can I be heroic?  This is no heroic age, setting me heroic examples.  We are growing more and more comfortable, frivolous, pleasure-seeking, money-making; more and more utilitarian; more and more mercenary in our politics, in our morals, in our religion; thinking less and less of honour and duty, and more and more of loss and gain.  I am born into an unheroic time.  You must not ask me to become heroic in it.”