Originatrix

Last Tuesday evening our friend Miss C., the “originatrix” of the Tableau performance, at the Town Hall, received a substantial and flattering complimentary benefit at the hands of the performers and the dear people who flocked to the hall in crowds.

His fundamental thought, then, is, that voluptuousness is the origin and seat of sin; the woman its originatrix, from the pleasure she first gave and experienced in it.

For instance, the Eugenie fashion of wearing the hair is not even so becoming to the sad, pensive sweetness of the face of the empress herself, the originatrix, as to the features of many of the ladies of her court, while many, who cannot support this style of wearing the hair, have resolutely rejected it.

Probably we shall never know who was the real originator or originatrix of the luxury.

The originator, or rather originatrix, of this valuable institution was the Empress Josephine, who in 1805 devoted a fund for the purpose of subsidising a house which should provide an honorable and attractive retreat for persons of the higher class fallen into comparative poverty—pauvres honteux, as they are untranslatably termed—but principally those who had held unpensioned offices in the civil ser- vice of the country, comprising, therefore, members of the haute bourgeoisie and of the noblesse.

This is probably Toyo-uke-bime-no mikoto (Sublime Goddess of Plenteous Food), who shares with Amaterasu no ohongami (the Great Lord Heaven-shiner) the headship over the deities of Ise, and who, by a sort of fissiparous self-division, became Kukunochi-no-kami (originatrix of trees), and Kayana-hime-no-kami (originatrix of grasses).

And is it not doubly singular—singularity upon singularity, so to speak—that we should have waged it?—that we, that for some seven centuries have been so far in the van of the progress of humanity, should now be as far in the rear, that the Mother of Freedom, with her Magna Charta, her Habeas Corpus Act, her Bill of Bights, and her well-nigh faultless Reformation, the first originatrix of the representative system of government, the first denunciatrix and repudiatrix of slavery, the first propounderess of the sublime principle of Free Trade—should now, for nearly three years, have been waging war against the world’s last, and perhaps greatest, discovery—the principle on which all Christendom, except ourselves and Russia, is fully agreed—that every civilised people, every people not wholly barbarous, every Christian Aryan people, should enjoy the incalculable blessing of self-government, which alone is perfect liberty?

Neither was Delia Bacon a German, the originatrix, if she was, of the Baconian hypothesis, of which Clarence King remarked that, the hypothesis having been established, the only remaining question was, “Who wrote Bacon?”