In any attempt to trace a single line of thought or a social tendency through a long and remote period the difficult accessibility of the material must be premised. It is disheartening to note how many of the desired facts lurk in corners and byways, and are come upon almost by chance. A stray allusion followed up may lead to some rich little pocket of information, while laboriously conducted explorations prove futile. It is the discovery of these pockets of ore that constitute the rewards of the adventure. But such satisfaction is constantly clouded by a sense of the pockets that have been missed. Whatever discoveries reward the investigator, there is always a tantalizing sense of having hardly more than passed the outlying boundaries of what might be found.

Along with sins of omission it is regrettably certain that there must be sins of commission. In individual instances the discovery of further material might result in a somewhat different evaluation of the literary or historic significance of the person concerned. And certain it is that fuller records would reveal force and charm in many a woman presented now by but a meager array of unsuggestive biographical facts.

A final difficulty results from a carelessness as to dates in contemporary records of the period studied, especially with regard to minor people, so that chronology is sometimes led into a dim and confused region of conjecture and approximation.

Omission of important persons, mistakes in emphasis, an occasional dubious chronology, are due in part to the general condition of literary biography till long after the middle of the eighteenth century. The details regarding men were often meager and inexact, but much more so was this the case with regard to women. When Ballard began the preliminary studies for his memoirs of learned ladies he found the utmost difficulty in getting any reliable data. He refers to Leland, Bale, Pits, and Tanner as men whose works he had studied for general method. But from none of these could he get direct aid in his own field of research. Various records of Oxford and Cambridge could render but incidental service, Edward Philips's Threatrum Poetarum (1675); John Aubrey's Brief Lives (known as early as 1680); William Winstanley's Lives of the most famous English Poets (1687); Gildon's edition of Langbaine's Dramatic Poets, with a second volume on Poets in 1688, were somewhat more helpful. But in all these put together there were only a few pages devoted to women. John Shirley's Illustrious History of Women (1686) and Juncker's Catalogue of Learned Women (1692) have practically nothing to offer towards a history of learned English women. John Evelyn's Numismata (1697) gives a list of renowned persons "worthy the honour of Medal," in the course of which he mentions some instances of the "Learned, Virtuous and Fair Sex," beginning with Boadicea. Thirteen Englishwomen are in the list, but with only the briefest notice. Giles Jacob's Poetical Register (1724) goes more into detail, but in his two volumes there are only fifteen pages of female biography. Mrs. Cooper includes no woman in her Muse's Library (1737) and Hayward in his The British Muse (1738) makes but one quotation from a woman. John Wilford's Memorials and Characters (1741) was compiled with the idea of presenting examples of piety and virtue. Of the eighty-one women noted only a few come within the category of learned women. Thomas Birch in his Illustrious Persons of Great Britain (1752) includes no women but Queens.

The meager gleanings from the best biographical records before 1752 put stronger emphasis on the importance of George Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain as a book of original research, and as the first source of detailed and ordered, and, in general, accurate information concerning the learned women of England.[505]

Of later sources the first is Theophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets (1753). Rather full accounts of fourteen women are given by Cibber, eight of them being names not included in Ballard's book.[506] The Eminent Ladies (1755) was but a weak compilation of poems with brief and perfunctory comment. In the New and General Biographical Dictionary, published in 1761, the most imposing biographical work of the period, out of more than five thousand names less than twenty English women of letters are listed.

The first book after Ballard to take up female biography exclusively appeared in 1766 and is entitled: Biographium Femineum. The Female Worthies: or, Memoirs of the Most Illustrious Ladies of all Ages and Nations, who have been Eminently distinguished for their Magnanimity, Learning, Genius, Virtue, Piety, and other excellent Endowments, conspicuous in all the various Stations and Relations of Life, public and private. Containing (exclusive of Foreigners) The Lives of above Fourscore British Ladies, who have shone with a peculiar Lustre, and given the noblest proofs of the most exalted Genius, and Superior Worth. Collected from History, and the most approved Biographers, and brought down to the present Times (1766). This book is based on Ballard, Cibber, and Eminent Ladies, but also, unfortunately, accepts Amory as an authority.

In 1779 William Alexander published The History of Women, in two volumes. Mr. Alexander has comparatively little to say about learned women. He wrote, he said, to "amuse and instruct the Fair Sex," hoping thus to lure them from poring over novels and romances. He avoided technical and foreign terms and all citation of authorities as being "perplexing to the sex," and while his book professes to be a sort of propagandist tract for female education, he so abhors female pendantry and so laments fair eyes dimmed by severe and intense study that his book is a distinct reaction from the dignified earlier ideals. Dr. Johnson admits no women into the society of his fifty-two English Poets (1779-81). The Biographia Britannica (1778-93) includes Mary Beale and ten literary women. All of these except Mrs. Delany had appeared in Ballard or Cibber. Mary Hays's Female Biography, published in England in 1803 and in America in 1807, in three volumes, includes celebrated women in "all Ages and Countries." It is based on Ballard and the other authorities already indicated. The uncritical character of the book is indicated by the remark of Miss Hays, "My book is intended for women and not for scholars." Robert Southey, in 1809, in his Specimens of the Later English Poets, begins with the time of James II. Out of two hundred and twenty-three poets represented, seventeen are women. In the thirty-two volumes of Chalmers's General Biographical Dictionary (1812) about thirty English learned ladies are briefly noted. In Campbell's British Poets (1819) there is but one woman, Katherine Philips, among the one hundred and seventy names he gives. Alexander Dyce, in Specimens of British Poetesses, in 1827, gives brief extracts in chronological order from eighty-three authors, but with only the slightest possible apparatus of notes and dates. The purpose of Mr. Dyce was to exhibit the progress of English women in poetry, and his book was planned and partly executed before he happened upon the Eminent Ladies, a reprint of which appeared about 1780. On a perusal of that book he found it so unimportant a precursor as not to interfere with his plan. Over half of Mr. Dyce's work is given to women after 1750. Of the forty-nine before that period, beginning with Juliana Berners and ending with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, very few are represented by more than two or three pages of quotation. Lady Winchilsea, owing doubtless to Wordsworth's recent eulogy of her, is given eleven pages. Mr. Dyce did considerable independent research, for he quoted from a good many poems by women not mentioned by previous authors. Wordsworth had planned a similar work and had made extracts for it, "lucid crystals," he says, "culled from a Parnassian Cave seldom trod."

About the middle of the nineteenth century various books, such as Miss Costello's Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen (1844), Mrs. Hale's Woman's Record (1853), Jane Williams's Literary Women of England (1861), Julia Kavanagh's English Women of Letters (1863), with other compilations treating especially of late eighteenth-century fiction but recognizing also the works of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Haywood, seemed to indicate a recrudescence of interest in the work of women. But in most of these books the treatment is so vague and popular as to be of little use.

Of more value than formal condensed statements in biographical compilations are autobiographies, letters, contemporary allusions, works in prose and verse, prefaces, and early individual biographies. Thanks to a steadily growing interest in the period 1660 to 1800, there has been an accumulation during recent years of special critical editions of early works, of manuscripts published after long years of oblivion, and of reprints of valuable productions. It is in particular to this class of material that the student must go in an attempt to evolve personalities from scattered facts.

The term "learned" as applied to women demands careful chronological definition. It would be used to-day, without any strong bias of approval or disapproval, to describe a woman who in some reputable realm of learning has a competent apparatus of the facts involved, and a mind trained to order and interpret these facts. Such intellectual activity would be differentiated from creative work in poetry, fiction, and drama. But the phrase "learned women" as used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had no such specialized application. The contemporary defenders of "The Excellency of the Female Sex" give the widest and loosest possible meaning to the term. It sometimes stood for the most solid attainments, but it was also made to cover very rudimentary intellectual strivings. An avowed taste for reading, the faintest interest in physical phenomena, the composition of slight little poems, the writing-out of prayers and meditations, even the copying of extracts into a common-place book, could, in applause or derision, be counted as learned occupations. This wide inclusiveness results inevitably in the practical breaking-down of any set of qualities as necessarily connoted by the term "learned."

Equally undiscriminating was the use of examples whereby to establish the possible mentality of women. History and tradition were of equal authority, the Muses and Sibyls counting as much as the great names of later days. The uncritical lists of learned ladies record as of apparently equal importance the "physical fancies" of the Duchess of Newcastle and the exact botanical knowledge of Elizabeth Blackwell; the playful coquetting with foreign tongues by some society ladies and the close linguistic attainments of Miss Elstob or Mrs. Collyer; the wide sweep of general information of Mrs. Delany and the minute investigation into the field of early English by Mrs. Cooper.

A similar ill-defined use of the term "learned" is inevitable in the present attempt to estimate the intellectual tendencies of the seventeenth and eighteenth century women. In the evaluation of the work of individual women as their names arise critical standards can be given due weight. But in general it is not the object of this study to test the scholastic, scientific, or literary work of the women of the period by modern academic ideas of excellence. The purpose here is rather to show the number of women whose interests were intellectual, whose chosen pursuits had to do with books and things of the mind, and who were demanding a new freedom of self-expression, new training, and new opportunities.

Still another preliminary statement seems necessary. The period from 1650 to 1760 is a rich and crowded one. Even when regarded from a single comparatively barren point of view such as an account of learned women, it offers too much material for a single volume. To keep at all within limits it is necessary to hold the presentation of each learned woman merely to those points in her life and work that have to do with her as an exponent of new ideals for women, or as marking by her own achievements new feminine possibilities in the arts, in learning, or in letters. Complete presentation would involve almost a separate volume for each important woman. Many of the women here studied offer interesting subjects for further investigation. A new insight into the religious, the social, and the domestic life of the period would be given by full biographies of such women as Anne Killigrew, Lady Winchilsea, Bathsua Makin, Mrs. Cooper, and indeed of many others. Such studies would be invaluable as a contribution to the history of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century.

A retrospect of the progress of the intellectual freedom and the systematic education of women in England does not reveal an orderly acceleration from period to period. There are, instead, periods of activity followed by periods of quiescence. Two such periods, one of activity, one of quiescence, may be noted before the Restoration.

The reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth have been called the golden age for learned women,[507] and even a cursory glance over these years serves to justify that reputation. Theoretical statements by distinguished foreigners such as that by Castiglione; the opinions of such men as Vives and Hyrde, of Mulcaster, Ascham, Udall, and Erasmus; the example of the royal family and many great nobles in securing the most learned instruction for their daughters; the influence of at least two learned queens, Catherine of Aragon and Elizabeth; the actual scholarship of many distinguished women; the warm praise of this scholarship by the most eminent men, made up a general atmosphere strongly stimulating to learned attainment by women. Individual opportunities of so high a character, and a reception so genial and even eager towards the intellectual activity of women did not again recur in England. But this golden age remains as hardly more than a brilliant picture; it has practically no important place in the progress of the education of women. The advantages given to women were nullified, so far as initiating more widespread activities is concerned, by two inherent defects. The learning of women had no legitimate purpose or outcome beyond the home. It was the object of adulation and flattery, but it seldom came into competition with the work of men where it could be judged on its merits. It had always a small audience favorably disposed in advance. Learning was a kind of high-class individual accomplishment purely for home consumption. A second defect was that learning belonged only to the daughters of the nobility or of the very rich. Even within these bounds it was sporadic, depending entirely on the opinion of the head of the family.

A gradual decline of interest in scholarship as an appropriate pursuit for damsels of high lineage was apparent even in Elizabethan days, and the change from Tudor ideals became marked in the period from the death of Elizabeth to the Restoration.[508] James looked upon women with contempt. Queen Anne's mother, Sophia of Mecklenburg, was a highly gifted woman who, after her retirement from public life, devoted her leisure to astronomy, chemistry, and other sciences. But Anne had none of her mother's intellectual interests. She cared only for fine dresses and jewels, progresses and masks, and gay frivolous entertainments.[509] So she brought no literary ideals or ambitions to counteract the king's cold indifference to education in general. Under Charles I and Henrietta Maria there might readily have arisen in a new and lighter form some educational ideals or schemes favorable to women, for the King loved music and painting and had well-developed literary tastes, and the Queen had great respect for the French salons of her day and was interested in the general ideas of the prÉcieuses. But the troubled times of the Civil War turned the minds of both men and women to sterner tasks. And it is perhaps not strange that this period proves the most barren one in English history so far as the education of girls is concerned.

At the Restoration we enter upon a new era of feminine activity. The beginnings of this era do not, however, coincide sharply with 1660, but belong at least a decade earlier. The chief women writing and studying between 1650 and 1675,[510] the Duchess of Newcastle, Mrs. Philips, Mary North, Dorothy Osborne, Margaret Blagge, Lady Pakington, the Countess of Warwick, Mrs. Hutchinson, and Lady Fanshawe, brilliantly ushered in this new period. With the coming of peace and national security women were apparently conscious not only of a new freedom, but of a new power and a new demand for some form of personal expression. After the unusual services rendered by them in war-times they could not settle down at once into the tame concerns of peace. This does not refer particularly to the women counted the heroines of the Civil War. It refers rather to the general emotional excitement and freeing of the spirit consequent on war activities. There was on the part of women a blind and unfocused but persistent and stimulating sense that larger and more varied opportunities were awaiting them. Latent powers had been stirred into self-consciousness and could not again be lulled into the old quiescence.

It was not only the inevitable burdens and responsibilities of war that had stirred women to new life. They could not fail to share in the new sense of personal importance and power that came to the people as a whole in their victorious struggle with autocracy. But it must be observed that along with this consciousness of national and political self-realization there was, under the Puritans, stern repression in matters of social and religious life. At the coming of Charles, however, all this was changed. With disastrous suddenness people found themselves free to follow with all gayety of spirit wherever their pleasure-loving instincts led. That such breaking of bonds resulted in an almost incredible outburst of immorality should not be allowed to obscure the fact that there was also a remarkable freeing of the mind from conventional standards. For good or for evil the individual found himself free to give energetic expression to his individual tendencies. By this freedom, by this license, women as well as men were profoundly moved.

The new impulses thus brought into being did not, however, give rise to anything like orderly and progressive activity on the part of women. The century following 1660 is seen to be an inchoate assemblage of beginnings. It is rich with a promise that comes to no decisive result. The path, instead of leading to some well-marked fortress or to some mount of vision, loses itself in unmeaning meanders.

There is, indeed, after the middle of the eighteenth century, even an appearance of retrogression in the attention devoted to learned pursuits for women. It is not till the end of that century that the movement acquires new momentum. Until we come to Catharine Macaulay, the novelists in the last quarter of the century, and Mary Wollstonecraft at its end, we have little that is new in theory or striking in achievement. From 1760 to 1775 no new woman writer of distinction appears. On ideals of education and conduct, Dr. James Fordyce, Mrs. Barbauld, and Mrs. Chapone, the recognized arbiters, are tame compilers of bromidic maxims with little of the dignity and spirit of the best writers on feminism six or seven decades earlier. The actual accomplishment of the period before 1760 was a destruction of old placidities, a restlessness of discussion, rather than a movement reaching definite achievement. But this discussion and the many individual examples of literary or learned accomplishment on the part of women were together slowly having their collective effect. Finally salons came and gave social prestige to the women who could think and talk brilliantly, and gave a tremendous impetus, if not to actual learning, yet to the idea that a woman should have sense, intelligence, a wide knowledge of books, and an understanding of history and current affairs.

From Catharine Macaulay to about the time of Tennyson's Princess is a period possessing considerable unity and one that would reward minute study. Such an investigation would bring us close to the establishment of great schools for the higher education of women and their consequent entrance upon a new era, an era that should look back with astonishment and respect to such ancestors as Anna van Schurman, Bathsua Makin, Dr. Hickes, and Mary Astell.

One of the most promising characteristics of the work of women is the emergence of learning from the aristocratic seclusion of the "golden age." In Tudor times it was in courtly circles only that learning was counted appropriate for women. Elizabeth Lucar stands as a solitary record of a lady from the wealthy middle class whose accomplishments were similar to those in the palaces of the great. But a significant change is to be noted in the century initiated about 1660. Duchesses and countesses are listed with wives and daughters of the clergy, of rich merchants, of needy tradesmen. From the Duchess of Newcastle to Mary Leapor, the gardener's daughter, the roll shows that aristocratic restrictions are no longer in full force in the realm of letters. In intimate connection with this change is the fact that authorship is no longer a private, home affair. The days when Margaret Roper was praised because she found her father and husband a sufficient audience had passed forever. The work of women was no longer a carefully tended flower of the hot-house. It must grow in the open. To be sure, women hesitated to publish. The Orindas and AstrÆas and Philomelas and Ardelias, whom Richardson derides as "the lovely dastards" of the sex, show how women sought protecting pseudonyms. But publish they did. They craved readers. The applauding males of their households were no longer adequate. Under the spell of a thousand traditional timidities and reluctancies they yet desired to see their words on the printed page, and they secretly coveted a public.

Furthermore, women were thinking of authorship as a tool and as a weapon, not merely as a private resource. Mrs. Behn, the first English woman to write definitely for money, was but the precursor of various women in succeeding years who came to regard the products of their minds as of pecuniary significance. Especially is this true towards the end of the period. When we find Mrs. Haywood and Mrs. Manley writing fiction of a sort that will sell, Mrs. Blackwell doing superb botanical work in order to pay the fine imposed on her husband, or Mrs. Collyer writing that she may supplement a meager income and educate her children, we may not have come upon great art or literature, but we have come upon a new idea for women, the possible economic value of their work. It was not an idea that reached any but the most meager fruition, but at least the seed of a new thought was sown.

A third change was a respect for literature as a weapon, sometimes of offense, but mainly of defense and propaganda. The women who had ideals to promulgate, causes to urge upon the indifferent, or evils to be meliorated, found that talking at home was weak and futile. They must secure a public, and so the pamphlets poured forth. In fact, the fundamental difference between the golden age of the Tudors and the much less agreeable period for learned women after the Restoration was this matter of a public. Learning for home consumption only and as an elegant resource was sterile. However feeble intrinsically, learning and letters used for a purpose and submitted to a public had within it the seeds of vitality and the promise of a future.

Of greater significance still is the large number of women who gave themselves to intellectual pursuits. From Mrs. Philips to Mrs. Collyer the roll is impressively long. Macaulay's statement concerning the illiteracy of the women of the period may have some justification, but the exceptions are so numerous as almost to disprove the rule. And all the way down the line there is the suggestion that many other women of like tastes and attainments have been lost in obscurity. Many extant productions have been preserved only by chance. Dorothy Osborne's letters, the biographies by Mrs. Hutchinson and Lady Fanshawe, Celia Fiennes's travels, Lady Winchilsea's grand folio, to name but a few, escaped destruction mainly through the undisturbed continuity of the family life, and possibly the inertia, of their possessors. And where a few manuscripts have been saved, many more have doubtless been destroyed. The loss to learning and letters is probably slight. But in estimating the strength of a tendency the numbers who were affected by it count as important testimony. Every woman whose mind was alert, demanding intellectual sustenance, and struggling towards self-expression, adds a further fraction of proof as to the vitality of the new impulse. And, while not susceptible of absolute verification, the general tantalizing consciousness of many shadowy presences of women whose ideas and efforts never reached the printed page is a not unimportant factor in one's personal conviction as to the very large number of women who were affected by the new unrest and the new aspiration hidden away under the ordinary routine of thought and work. But even without any such shadowy presences the list is long enough to be convincing.

In an attempt to tabulate the variety of ways in which women sought self-expression, we note first those fields of endeavor in which their work was but scantily represented. In some cases these areas of restricted productivity are characteristic of the age in general, in some cases, the outcome of limitations imposed on women in particular.

One type of the woman interested in letters becomes practically non-existent in the period under discussion, and that is the patroness whose rank and wealth and intellectual tastes summoned about her a brilliant coterie of poets and men of science to whom she extended substantial aid. The patroness plays no important part in English life after Elizabethan times. Lady Bedford is the last noted representative. Mary North's little circle of literary ladies, and the Matchless Orinda's "Circle of Friendship" are coteries, but without a Lady Bountiful as the center. Lady Pakington comes nearer the type in her assemblage of Church of England divines. But on the whole the patroness and salon are not revived till the time of the bas bleus in the mid-eighteenth century, and then only in a modified form.

In the fine arts the attainments of women were slight and amateurish. Mary Beale was the only portrait-painter of distinction, and in landscape-painting no woman is represented by valuable canvases. But the same state of affairs held true of English men. With the solitary exception of Mr. Riley all of the noted portrait-painters in England before 1760 were foreigners. The landscape artists, too, were foreigners, or were mere copiers of the Italian or Flemish masters. So the deficiency of women in the fine arts may justly be counted but a part of the general national deficiency. The immediate and permanent success of women on the stage has been sufficiently emphasized. But it should also be noted that acting was a career necessarily limited to a comparatively small number of women.

Many kinds of work more or less professional in character were but slightly represented. Except for governesses in great families and the mistresses of boarding-schools for girls there were no women teachers, hence teaching as an ultimate goal was eliminated as a determining factor in the kind of intellectual work pursued. Even the governesses were not chosen for scholarship, but for character and good-breeding. They had to do only with little children, and had no need for learning. And the school-mistresses secured outside masters for the various studies and accomplishments, confining their own work to morals and general management.

Women had so long had home medicaments to make and administer, the mistress of a great estate had so long been the sole resort in matters concerning the health of her dependents, that we might expect medicine to be one of the first important new fields conquered by women, but such was not the case. The Duchess of Newcastle, to be sure, gave her fancy free rein in the wide fields of anatomy and physiology. But besides such young women as Elizabeth Bury, renowned for her knowledge of simples and her skill in diagnosis, and Jane Barker who followed her brother's lead in reading medical works, there are no English women on record before 1760 as having given themselves with any serious interest to the study of medicine. The only possible exception would be in midwifery. In this department of medical or surgical practice women had the matter almost in their own hands. Mrs. Pilkington says that her father, Dr. Van Lewen, was the first man midwife in England. There must, then, have been developed among women considerable knowledge and practical skill. But their work was in no sense of professional rank. There was no definite training required, there was no way of applying standardized tests of excellence, and there was no organization among the women themselves. And almost no women attempted to put into book form the results of their experience. Mrs. Jane Sharp's The Midwives' Book (1671) is a solitary exception. Mrs. Cellier's book advocating the maintenance of a "Corporation of Skilful Midwives" is the only suggestion I have found looking towards professional training and recognition such as nurses now receive.

In housekeeping matters women were also in the main content to do the work without any formal statements of the mysteries of their art. There was much passing about of receipts for cookery, for toilet preparations, for curative drinks and salves, but when these were collected and published, it was usually the work of some enterprising book-seller. Mrs. Hannah Woolley, Mrs. "A. M.," and Mrs. Hannah Glasse, are the only women I have come upon who could even in the faintest way foreshadow the great mass of present-day writing on questions of domestic science.

Although the satire in some of the comedies would indicate that women were manifesting some interest in the new discoveries through the telescope and the microscope, and were sometimes giving themselves to laboratory experiments in dissection, there is no serious record of any real research in science by women. Even Mrs. Blackwell's exquisite and accurate botanical work is an artistic rather than a scientific achievement so far as she herself is concerned. Her botanical facts were not entirely the result of personal investigation.

To be "the breeders of children in their low age" had always been so unquestionably the province of women that they would supposedly be past-masters in that art, and it might be expected that they would use the first freedom of their pen to write such things as would suit the tastes and needs of children. Again, such is not the case. But it must be recognized that there was nowhere any catering to the literary needs of children. Bunyan's Book for Boys and Girls (1680), Mason's Little Catechism (1693), Watts's Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1720) represent a few attempts to render religious truth more palatable to the child's mind, but real literature for children did not begin till 1744. Mr. Newberry's Little Pretty Pocket Book of that year initiated a kind of literature the vast extent of which can now hardly be estimated. And in the earliest period of literature for children Mrs. Collyer's Christmas Box and Miss Fielding's Little Female Academy, both in 1749, must take an honorable place.

One more kind of work for which women have manifested exceptional ability in modern times is in the conduct of humanitarian enterprises. Traditionally they were the loaf-givers. The new thing was to organize generosity into permanent efficiency and to make it operative beyond the limits of the family estate. Mrs. Bovey and Lady Elizabeth Hastings are early instances of women devoting time, mentality, and money to the development of systematic benevolence. But there were few women whose economic independence and sense of civic responsibility were so happily united.

Still another realm in which women to-day are finding large opportunity was practically closed to the women of earlier times, and that is public speaking. Except among the Quakers no woman spoke, on any subject whatsoever, before an audience. She might sing or she might act with applause. But talking was outside her bounds. Acting was but repeating the words of others; singing was a gift of the gods; but talking to an audience, whether to delight or instruct, carried plain implications of self-conscious superiority in knowledge or power. It was incredibly unfeminine and not to be endured. On this topic the authority of St. Paul was still unquestioned.

If from the women who are to-day preparing for some sort of professional work, we should exclude all who expect to teach, all who are planning to enter upon some sort of scientific research, all who are training themselves for public speaking, all who are preparing for the effective management of large enterprises, all who are writing on domestic or medical matters, the scope of feminine activity would be almost unbelievably narrowed. These various kinds of work are now recognized channels through which whatever ability a woman may have may find expression. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries if a woman had a good mind and felt impelled to use it, none of these avenues were normally open to her. It is difficult to imagine what the withdrawal of all these opportunities would mean in the reduction of adequate stimuli to good work. Hence the few women who did pioneer work in these various departments must have been moved by some strong urgency of the spirit. They were adventurers lured by the fascination of the new and the untried, and their effort is significant even when the region they conquered proved to be but the barren edge of a great continent.

It was in writing that women were least hampered, and, as has been stated, it was in writing that we find their work most varied and abundant.

As playwrights they were especially successful in comedy. Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Centlivre take a very creditable rank in the comedy of lively intrigue and social satire. Tragedy appealed to more women writers than did comedy, but they were less successful in that realm. Tragedy was considered so inherently virtuous that the most high-minded could find in it edification, and young girls who were forbidden attendance on comedies were freely allowed to witness tragedies. For this reason women writers with dramatic aspirations, but to whom the license of the comedy was distasteful, applied themselves to tragedy. That Catherine Cockburn's Fatal Friendship should be counted the best of these tragedies is perhaps a sufficient condemnation of the entire series. But it must be again remembered that it was not an age in which any writers excelled in tragedy. The heroic plays of Dryden, the domestic tragedy of Otway, and here and there a play of some contemporary vogue, such as Ambrose Philips's Distressed Mother and Addison's Cato, practically make up the list. Of the tragedies recorded by Genest between 1660 and 1760 very few of those having any but the most ephemeral success are by contemporary authors. Hence the failure of women in this realm is in accordance with the trend of the times.

Novels did not come into existence till so late in the period under discussion that we have little chance to test women in this field which later proved to be peculiarly their own. Mrs. Behn's romances, with their realistic detail, their high-wrought emotions, scenic setting, and didactic intent, gave early examples of what might be done. But it is not till after Richardson that women had conspicuous success in works of fiction. After Mrs. Behn and before 1760 we have only the scandalous annals of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood, Miss Barker's inchoate autobiographic tales, Mrs. Lennox's satiric novel, and the didactic stories of Mrs. Collyer and Miss Fielding.

In an age when facile versifying was counted a gentleman's accomplishment, and when the heroic couplet offered a form in which mechanical precision could be tested by the rule of the thumb, it would be strange if women with some literary knack did not write poetry. And it is true that nearly every woman who wielded a pen trained it sometimes into the conventional pindarics or heroics. But on the whole, with most women writers poetry was but an occasional resource. It was not their chosen mÉtier. There were, in fact, but two women, Mrs. Philips and Lady Winchilsea, who took their stand on poetry as their life's achievement. Orinda had grace, tenderness, and fine feeling. Ardelia had subtlety of intuition, a delicate independence of taste, and an occasional high excellence of form and phrase. By these qualities these two women are marked off from the poetasters of their day and have some permanent importance. But the mass of verse by women was undistinguished. It offers, however, some interesting general characteristics.

Compared to the total amount of verse by women, religious verse takes an unexpectedly small place. In no case that I can recall were a woman's religious poems her best work. The most popular as well as the most turgid and commonplace sort of religious writing was the Scripture paraphrase. Poems of pure devotion, of prayer and of praise, are less often found. In such as do occur we might expect the personal note, something winged and lyrical. But they are disappointingly timid and imitative. We have various proofs that there was no absolute lack of poignant spiritual conflict and endeavor during this period, but religious emotion was apparently so accustomed to decorous forms that it could not be driven into the nakedness of soul consequent upon religious abasement or ecstasy. The best religious verse of the period avoids strong emotions. It consists of gentle moralizing touched by personal feeling. There is a note of genuineness in the emphasis on fortitude, on self-control and self-abnegation, and on melancholy endurance. But the most that can be said for the religious poetry by women is that it was about on a par with contemporary religious poetry by men. It was an age of strong church affiliations and of theological discussion, but it was not an age that invited the expression of fervent religious emotion.

There is also little genuine love poetry. There is much that is friendly and affectionate, but almost nothing that is impassioned. This, however, is a negation applicable to all verse of the period. Few memorable love lyrics are to be found in English verse between Waller's Go, lovely rose, and the songs of Robert Burns. But women had been so long emancipated from reason and traditionally given over to the feelings that love poetry, at least of the sentimental variety, might have been thought their natural output. As a matter of fact, the case was quite otherwise. The poetry by women had not, in general, what would be termed a feminine tone. Women do not seem to have given their instincts free play when they took up the poetical quill. Poetry was either a trifling temporary resource or it was a serious, even solemn affair, and must concern itself with weighty matters of vice and virtue. The style in poetry is consequently much less effective than in prose. There is almost nowhere through all the mass of this verse any brightness of fancy, any playfulness of wit, any mollifying sense of humor. There is little lightness of touch, there are few felicities and unforgettable lines. And there is more of scorn, indignation, and didacticism than of sweetness and light.

In various departments of prose women writers reached an excellence considerably above the general prose average of the time. This is especially true in certain rather new branches of writing. The fragments of autobiography that have come down to us are almost without exception fresh, unpretentious, and delightful pieces of work. The records given us by the Duchess of Newcastle, Mrs. Hutchinson, Miss Barker, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Elstob, and others, simply whet the appetite for more. If Anne Killigrew and Anne Kingsmill and Bathsua Pell and Lady Elizabeth Hastings, and very many other ladies, had left similar records we should have a legacy of simple, straightforward, and individual prose worth reams of pindarics or theological discussions. The intimate personal appeal of the subject-matter seemed to make for a picturesqueness and homely vigor of style. The only women who wrote biography—the Duchess of Newcastle, Lady Fanshawe, and Mrs. Hutchinson—wrote about their husbands, so they were, in reality, carrying on the autobiographical element. And their success is perhaps due to an intimate knowledge of the facts, and a strong personal interest such as had animated the sketches of their own childhood. At any rate, these three Lives rank in interest with Evelyn's Mrs. Godolphin and Roger North's Lives of the Norths. Letters belong in the same general realm, and offer some of the most entertaining writing of the period. There are many reasons for thinking that letter-writing was a more general feminine resource than existing records would indicate. Such letters as are now extant have been preserved almost by accident. They were not counted of contemporary importance and very few of them reached publication before the nineteenth century. Yet the list is fairly representative.

We have the letters of Margaret Blagge to Mr. Godolphin; those of the Osborne ladies, Dorothy, Martha, and Sarah; Orinda's epistles to Poliarchus; Mrs. Evelyn's letters to her son's tutor; Mrs. Rowe's to the Duchess of Somerset; Mrs. Delany's to numerous friends; Miss Talbot's to Miss Carter; Miss Carter's to a host of correspondents; Mrs. Cockburn's to her lovers and to her niece; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's records from many lands as well as her early letters to Mr. Montagu. As a body of documentary material these letters are invaluable. And they are interesting reading. The keen eye for dress and customs would have qualified some of these ladies for the novel of manners. There are pungent character sketches and witty comment on social foibles. These letters show often a humor and gayety of spirit such as find entrance into no other forms of feminine writing. And the style is almost uniformly easy and natural. Dorothy Osborne's objection to stilted and pedantic letters could have been applicable to few women letter-writers. They had no thought of a public and so escaped the snare of professionalism in tone. The letters contain records of love and of grief, of moments of vivid emotion, of deep spiritual experience, of friendships and of hatreds, of hopes and despairs, and because all these came from the mind and the heart of the writer they are told in a convincing manner.

Another similar realm is that of travels. When women went on tours they saw everything that was to be seen. And they set down the details with infinite patience. Celia Fiennes has no literary style at all, but no other description of England between 1650 and 1760 contains so much detail worth remembering. She was the most spirited and indefatigable of travelers, and this intensity of interest found its way into her book and communicates itself to the reader. Had she kept her diary with any remotest thought of publication she might have been more lucid, but she might also have been less vigorous, individual, and picturesque. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Letters created a sensation, as well they might, for as a writer of travels she out-distanced all competitors.

The kinds of prose writing so far indicated were all animated by personal experience and interest. That is certainly one secret of their charm. And it is to be observed that they are marked by qualities of observation and analysis later proved natural to women by their success in fiction. But there is another department of writing less naturally associated with women in which they were nevertheless conspicuous for merit, and that is some form of controversial writing.

When women espoused and defended a cause, it was with a heat of personal conviction that robbed them of self-consciousness and contributed to vigor and animation of style. Even earlier women, such as Anna van Schurman and Mrs. Makin, who felt that to be convincing they must show their ability to argue with the most rigid scholastic apparatus, now and then had passages of high-wrought feeling or indignation that burst the trammels of their logical form, and carry even to modern readers a sense of the intensity of conviction that moved the writer. Bathsua Pell's Essay in 1673 is an admirable piece of propagandist writing. No defender of higher education in the early days of women's colleges was more pungent in attack, or tossed off the unmeaning arguments of opponents with more contemptuous ease. In writing on the higher education of women it is with the zeal of an enthusiast that Mary Astell marshals the details of her new scheme. She had thought her plan through to the end and she describes it with clearness and precision. Its noble possibilities give rise to seriousness and dignity of style. And when her mind is overborne by a recognition of the many foolish women and the scornful men who would render her ideals abortive, she is roused to passages of energetic satire. She is even acrimonious and vituperative. There is nothing soft or appealing or feminine about her work. If she convinces it will not be by the arts of her sex, but by argument and caustic attack. She does not entreat, she commands and instructs. The anonymous author of the Defence describes, with keen analysis, picturesque phrasing, and gay raillery, the beaux, the clodpate squires, the pedants, and the virtuosi of her day. Few contemporary satiric portraits are of more penetrating wit. "Sophia" of pamphlet fame carries on the successful propagandist writing. And Lady Winchilsea's one prose essay is indicative of her vigorous possibilities in speech when her ideas and feelings were involved. One point concerning the generally dignified tone of these essays in defense of women should be noted, and that is that they were not the outcome of personally bitter experiences or disappointments on the part of the authors. The writing was informed rather by a sense of high civic idealism and responsibility. Though the advancement of women is presented as a matter of justice, and of importance to women as individuals, the arguments always turn to a larger conception, and that is the service rendered to Society and the Church by educated women.

In religious controversy, also, women excelled. A practical or personal cause was not imperative. They wrote with equal vehemence, sincerity, and will to convince, when they were defending an abstract principle as when they were protesting against injustice, or trying to further some specific reform. Lady Masham, Susanna Hopton, Mary Astell, and Mrs. Cockburn sufficiently illustrate the success of women as disputants. The fact that nearly all the topics on which these religious controversialists wrote are now dead issues, and that the writing has inevitably passed into oblivion along with the ideas it championed, should not be allowed to obscure the very evident contemporary respect accorded women as redoubtable antagonists and able advocates. There were also women who wrote little, such as Lady Pakington and Lady Conway, to whom the best men of the day gave high esteem for the soundness of their patristic and philosophical learning, and for the acuteness of their thinking.

Writers on personal religious experience or on hortatory subjects do not reach so high a grade of work. The prodigious industry of various compilers, annotators, and note-takers—the true Church of England "sermon-tasters"—such as Lady Brooke and Lady Halkett, is less indicative of learning than of a pronounced religious bias. And in prose, as in verse, the free and natural expression of spiritual experience was not characteristic of the age.

That more of this controversial and religious writing was not published can hardly be counted a loss to literature. Religious meditations quicken the inner life, and the effort to put religious emotions and beliefs into some literary form must contribute to a more active mentality, but the resultant printed page is not necessarily of permanent interest. The ardors and acrimonies, the labyrinthine twisting of arguments, the niceties of interpretation, the array of authorities, are all a leaden weight to the modern reader. And most meditations on virtues and vices are hardly more stimulating. But we cannot pass the great mass of these religious writings without noting what a new impression they give us of social England, especially in the second half of the seventeenth century. A student of Restoration comedy sees the court of England in its most frivolous and morally repellent aspect. But these women whose minds were so set on religion were all members of the aristocracy. Margaret Blagge, Anne Killigrew, and Anne Kingsmill, women of the most sincere and ardent piety, were in intimate association with the courts of Charles II and James II. Lady Pakington, Lady Brooke, Lady Halkett, Lady Masham, Lady Russell, Mary Astell, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, and, later, Lady Huntington, were all by rank or especial opportunity in the highest and most exclusive social circles and so in contact with the profligacy of the court. Their extreme assiduity in all matters of religion, in church attendance, in private prayer, in meditation, in self-examination, in their austere moral standards, were a violent reaction from the evil life about them. In the homes and small social circles where their influence could be felt was being prepared a body of moral indignation, a desire for uprightness and purity of life, that gave to Jeremy Collier's attack on the stage in 1698 so overwhelming a response, and that was the sustaining force back of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

The writing done by women between 1660 and 1760 is more impressive from its amount and variety than from any high excellence of its component parts. A mere calling of the great names of the period—Milton, Bunyan, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Addison, and Steele—is adequate to show that no woman of the time is comparable to these men in mental stamina and energy, or in deft literary manipulation. The dramatic work by women presents no such brilliant social satire as we find in Etherege and Wycherley, no wit so penetrating and sparkling as in Congreve's Way of the World, no humor so innocent and likable as in Steele's Tender Husband. In poetry Orinda and Ardelia make but a poor showing beside the giants of the day. There are no women writers on literary criticism even approaching the mastery of Dryden. There are no essayists with the light touch and social ease of Addison and Steele. There are no novelists to be ranked with Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.

These rather damaging negations amount, however, in the final analysis, only to a statement that among the comparatively small number of women writers no one reached the pre-eminence of the eight or ten most distinguished literary men. But the same statement could be made concerning the crowd of men striving for success in authorship. Of most men it could be said that their best endeavors left wide unconquered fields between them and the elect. It is, indeed, much to say of women that, untrained, with no stimulus of money or fame, a considerable number of them yet attained to an honorable place in writers of a class below the best, and that in some realms such as autobiography, biography, travels, and letter-writing, and in writing inspired by some social reform, some propaganda of religion or ethics, they rank among the best of their time. The same may be said of their work in pure scholarship. Miss Elstob, Miss Carter, and Mrs. Collyer, in their respective fields of Anglo-Saxon, Greek, and German, were exact and thorough beyond the demands of contemporary standards.

But even if there were not many successes to record, the great amount of work done by women would still carry its own sort of proof. In establishing the existence of a tendency it is not the single brilliant example, the genius, the persons of extraordinary ability, that count. It is rather the aims, ambitions, attempts, of many persons variously striving in the same general direction.

The general seventeenth and eighteenth century opinion concerning learned women finds fairly complete statement in contemporary comedy. The persistence of the learned lady as a comic type serves incidentally as corroborative proof of the increasing attention given by women to learned pursuits, for no stage type remains amusing from year to year unless personages at least moderately correspondent to the type exist in sufficient numbers to count as a factor in social life. A basis of reality is necessary to give the type currency. But the comedy is more important as voicing a general critical estimate of values. A character does not hold its own as a comic type unless to the mass of theater-goers it presents itself as out of focus with common sense. A moral or social judgment is implied. The laugh that followed Biddy Tipkin and Polly Honeycomb and Lydia Languish was a recognition of the absurdity involved in regulating real life by the rules of romance, and the underlying protest against too free access to fiction was quite in line with the diatribes of various grave moralists. So, too, with the learned lady. The comic character gained its point from the assumption on the part of the playwright and the audience that there was a fundamental incongruity between the lady and her learning. Learning did not belong to the lady, and when she assumed it she was thereby justly betrayed into all sorts of humiliations and absurdities. Back of every picture there was, consciously or unconsciously, the critical judgment. Learning and ladies do not coalesce. Either the lady abandons the learning or the learning spoils the lady.

There are two kinds of learned ladies represented in the comedy. In the case of young, lovely, and well-dowered girls, learning was but a foible. When convinced of its absurdity, these desirable maidens put aside their big folios and became the properly humble, adoring, and ignorant wives of the heroes whose sound good sense had shown them their folly. The unpleasanter elements of the comic portraits belong to dissatisfied wives whose souls were still bent on amorous adventure; to obsolescent ladies unwilling to confess the decay of their charms; to the old and the homely whom no bravery of attire and no battery of glances and graces could restore to the marriage market. To ladies of both classes Platonism is a name to conjure with. All physical manifestations of love are abhorrent to them. The mystic union of souls is as much as the truly refined can tolerate. To the young learned ladies this doctrine of austerity has at first a genuine appeal, but is quickly proved impracticable and fallacious. To the other ladies virtue is but a screen to mask their discredited charms.

The knowledge of the learned ladies is as spurious as their virtue. They profess an intimate knowledge of Latin and Greek, and French seems their native tongue. They are at ease in the jargon of philosophical systems. They follow the telescope with the ardor of the Royal Society itself. Their studies are full of mathematical books and instruments. The scalpel and microscope lead them along the path of anatomical research. But in all this parade of learning there is no real scholarship. The ladies are pretentious and conceited, flaunting their false Latin and Greek before all comers, claiming to have explored the depths of knowledge when their short swallow-flights have scarcely brushed the surface.

The comedy may be said to embody the ordinary view as to the unsuitableness of learning for women. This implied critical negation is given a positive analogue in the actual training given to girls. Their early education was not neglected as is shown by the numbers of masters and tutors provided for the young daughters of good families. And from six to fourteen many girls were sent to the numerous boarding schools for young misses. But whether at home or in school the teaching included little more than deportment, accomplishments, and housewifery. These were what, in the language of Mr. Verney, would render a girl "considerable in the eyes of God and man." Hannah Wood's school was the most advanced of these minor schools for girls, and Sarah Fielding's Little Female Academy depicts the best that was done for younger girls. In any case education apparently ceased at fifteen or sixteen.

The schools provided for girls represent what it was in general thought that they needed. The comedy represents the absurdity of trying to pass these limits. Confirmatory of these views would be many private expressions by both men and women. There were, of course, hundreds of intelligent men to whom any change in the status of women seemed hostile to the best interests of society. And there were hundreds of women who flouted all thoughts of learning as essentially, eternally unfeminine. The Spectator records that at a certain period in the court of France it was counted a mark of ill-breeding to pronounce hard words right and that ladies not infrequently took occasion to use such words "that they might show a Politeness in murdering them." And the diatribes in the English feminist pamphlets from Bathsua Makin to "Sophia" show how many women in high circles boasted of ignorance as one of their charms.

But we come to quite a different state of affairs when we consider the opinions of the progressive minority. The proposed schemes for higher education, although without immediate practical result, are notable indications of a new era of thought. Bathsua Makin's was the first formulated plan. But her effort to graft new fruit on the old stock resulted in a singular mixture. Her impassioned desire to induct girls into the excellencies of higher learning was hampered in various ways. She could not lessen the attention paid to the accomplishments; she could not venture to push the school age beyond sixteen; and she could not make her beloved linguistics compulsory. What she did accomplish was not in the establishment of an ordered system. It was rather the impress of her tastes and advanced ideas on the minds of individual pupils. The girls who went from the Tottenham High Cross School to various distinguished homes in England had no alarmingly fluent or exact knowledge of Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. But they had all at least been invited to look within the portals of the palace of learning and some had found it rich and alluring. To all had come a new conception of the learning possible to women. Mrs. Makin's court prestige, her reputation for prodigious scholastic attainments, her courage, originality, and independence, made her a dignified and an authoritative figure. It is a matter of regret that full annals of her school were not preserved.

The education proposed by Dr. Hickes in his remarkable sermon in 1683, ten years after Mrs. Makin established her school, was not analyzed into details. But when he suggested for women seminaries of learning similar to Oxford and Cambridge with only such changes in the instruction and the regimen as might be found advisable to fit them for their lives as women, and when he urged rich and childless women to make their wealth serve humanity by founding such colleges for girls, he was too far ahead of his time to meet any immediate practical response, or even any opposition.

The next plan came from Mary Astell. This was a matured scheme. Her college was to be a sort of conventual retreat without vows and with an emphasis on the intellectual as well as the religious life. Publicity, college honors, degrees, were not thought of. There were to be no required studies, nor does she suggest even an orderly progression of lectures. The heterogeneous character of her proposed clientÈle forbade any rigidity of plan. Mary Astell seems to have looked about her and found many women to whom the customary rÉgime offered no satisfactory place. There were widows who did not choose remarriage, spinsters unwelcome in the homes allotted them by kinship, girls with dowries too slender to make an advantageous marriage probable, young heiresses subject to the too adventurous pursuit of impecunious lovers and so in need of a haven pending marriage. All these uncoÖrdinated needs were to be met by the new institution. The plan was to provide agreeable surroundings wherein women could tranquilly and without hostile criticism work out their own salvation. Practical beneficence, teaching, study in various realms, religious meditation, were the avenues open to individual choice. To the women who remained permanently in the college a life of dignified achievement was possible. Upon the young women who were destined to be wives and mothers in important homes would be exerted an influence tending to ennoble them in their domestic relations, and the learning they had gained would prove a resource amidst the distractions and trials of life. The plan included too much, and the adjustments rendered necessary by its captivating flexibility would have taxed any organizer to the utmost. Perhaps it is as well that the scheme was not put to the test of practice. Mary Astell's contribution was in the idea she set forth and in her eloquent defense of that idea.

It is surprising that Defoe's plan for a woman's college should have been coincident with Mary Astell's, yet independent of it. Defoe's fertile imagination creates curious buildings in which to house his Academy. He evidently considers Mary Astell's plan as too loose in general structure and too religious in tone to be practicable. He narrows his work down to such studies as are given in public schools.

After Defoe we hear of no further plans for higher education. But the idea lingered in the minds of many. Richardson in Clarissa Harlowe suggests such an institution, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu says that it was her youthful ambition to be foundress of a college. In Mrs. Centlivre's Basset Table the learned young Valeria is advised to found a woman's college in which the pupils shall be called "Valerians." The most curious and interesting embodiment of the scheme was that by Thomas Amory. The fullness and realistic precision of detail in his account of the "Hertfordshire Religious Retirement" were such as to make his heroine, the foundress, accepted as an historical personage. The fictitious narrative is, however, of especial significance as showing the persistence of Mary Astell's abortive plan.

In complete harmony with these various schemes for giving women greater intellectual freedom was the attitude in many private homes. It is quite surprising to discover how many studious girls had a favorable home environment. Elizabeth Jocelyn's grandfather, a distinguished bishop, conducted her studies. Mary North's father "fostered her little assemblage of female literati." Lady Pakington was taught by the learned Sir Norton Knatchbull. Lucy Apsley's father spurred her on to outdo her brothers in Latin, and Mr. Hutchinson fell in love with her for her poetry and learning. Dudleya North had the same teachers and studies as her brothers until they went to the University. Damaris Cudworth's mind was her father's joy and pride and Locke was her tutor. Bishop Burnet provided for his daughter Mary all possible opportunities in books and art. John Evelyn cherished the intellectual tastes of his daughter and showed her writings and paintings with pride. Anne Baynard, Anna Hume, Elizabeth Singer, were girls whose early literary tendencies found paternal approval and aid. William Elstob gave fullest sympathy and guidance to his ambitious young sister, the indefessa comes of his studies. And Elizabeth Carter's intellectual needs ruled the household.

These protected home studies were not unlike the opportunities offered girls in Tudor times and had the same disadvantages. There were no ordered courses of study. The depths and shallows of a girl's learning were largely dependent on the tastes of her father or tutor. She entered upon such a line of work as offered itself, prepared herself for it as she went along, and achieved what she could. As compensations for a training so desultory were the concentration and zest of the work, the undisciplined ardor of the pioneer, contact with great books and men of well-seasoned learning.

It is important to note that these scattered homes where the daughter found herself free to develop learned tastes were doubtless more numerous than is at first apparent. We know of a few such homes because of chance published records. But there must have been many homes where the lettered leisure such as we find in the Evelyn family, in Lord Winchilsea's at Eastwell, and in Archbishop Secker's at Canterbury, was shared in to the fullest extent by the ladies of the household. No daughter of the family might attain to notice as a writer, but the result of such reading and thinking would be a high level of general intelligence which might, in the mass, be of more significance than authorship.

More important still as indicative of a new era is the favor accorded learned women by many men of high standing. The adulation given the Duchess of Newcastle may have been inspired by her rank and wealth, but Jeremy Taylor, Cowley, and the Earl of Roscommon had no such reason for their homage to Orinda. The clergymen who gathered at Lady Pakington's rejoiced in her great learning. Dryden gave to Anne Killigrew such praise as awaits few poets and artists. The Norths gave honorable public recognition of Dudleya North's remarkable linguistic attainments. The family circle at Eastwell applauded Lady Winchilsea's poems. Mrs. Blackwell's work received formal recognition from the most learned doctors of the day. Of the early novel-writers Richardson is so well recognized as the sex's champion, and as the champion of learned ladies in particular, that his services need no further emphasis. Fielding's satirical picture of Mrs. Western ends with the conclusion that "petticoats should not meddle," but he more than turns the scale by the opinions he expresses in the Prefaces to his sister's books. Most men of ability preferred as companions women of good minds and a fair stock of ideas. Even Bishop Burnet, while afraid of general education, praises the intellectual endowment and learned attainments of each of his three wives. And Swift, though contemptuous of the race of women, for close comradeship chose Stella, a woman of wit, sense, and learning, in preference to some one of the doll or clinging-vine type. And his amiability, though rather too condescending, towards various literary ladies, may in part offset his brutal general statements. The fact is, nearly every woman of learned or literary attainments was accorded praise—even an undue meed of praise—from her immediate circle and from at least a few of her distinguished contemporaries.

Furthermore, publication of worthy work was made a matter of urgency. Dr. Hickes did all in his power to bring Elizabeth Elstob's Anglo-Saxon work before the learned public of his day, and it was he who insisted on the publication of Susanna Hopton's letters. Lady Masham's Letters of the Love of God were brought out only on the insistence of John Norris. Mrs. Cockburn's early philosophical writings received immediate praise from Bishop Burnet, John Norris, and John Locke. But for Archbishop Secker Miss Carter's Epictetus would have remained in manuscript. It was through Bishop Burnet's insistence that his wife's Meditations were published.

And still one more debt must be recorded, for some of the most important books in behalf of women were written by men. From Gerbier to Ballard the list is an interesting one. No woman ventured on statements so astounding as those which Poulain de la Barre deduced from his fundamental assumption of the equality of the sexes. His arguments may have been but an academic pushing of a principle to its logical conclusion, or his book may even have been satirical in intent, but the English translation was evidently made in all seriousness and served as a basis for "Sophia's" most audacious claims. Specific attempts to bring female genius into knowledge and repute were by men. John Duncomb's Feminead in 1751 leads the list, and before 1760 we have the Poems by Eminent Ladies of Bonnell and Thornton, the Lives by Theophilus Cibber, the exaltation of learned women in John Buncle, and, chief of all, the monumental work by George Ballard.

In summary it seems fair to say that while there was a general opinion adverse to the learning of women and suspicious of it, there were yet many men who seriously held views that would not sound antiquated in any modern defense of the higher education of women.

In all the discussions of plans for the intellectual training of women two suggestive limitations are to be noted. One is that nearly all men and women who favored the higher education did so because of the advantage it would be to the Church. The Quakers recognized the right of women to speak in public because they believed such action authorized by the Scriptures, but the freedom so granted did not go beyond religious topics. Susanna Wesley's ministry to her husband's parishioners was excusable only because her teaching was in the service of the Church. And the clergymen of high rank who favored learned women did so because the piety of these women would probably prove more advantageous if it were trained. Even Ballard put extra emphasis on the ladies who read the Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek. And it was probably ethical rather than literary standards that precluded any mention in his record of women such as Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Haywood. In all Ballard's many pages I do not recall even a hint that his learned ladies could be accused of any irregularities of life or doctrine. And it is because women are naturally devout that Amory chooses learned young ladies to expound his new religion.

The basis of Bishop Burnet's objection to Mary Astell's college was that a body of women thus set apart for learning might conceivably prove inimical to the Church. The isolated learned lady under the charge of some wise husband or father could presumably be guided in right paths or suppressed. But who could give bonds for a college of learned women? It was the attitude towards the Church that turned the scale against or in favor of higher education. In point of fact, no woman—not even the most profligate—wrote against religion. On the contrary, all women of letters—even the most profligate—wrote in favor of religion. Genuinely, or as a matter of convention, they all upheld virtue and the authority of the Church.

A second limitation is that the ultimate outcome of any greatly increased intellectual freedom for women was but dimly descried. If women were permitted to pursue learning into remote fastnesses, if they were allowed to thread their difficult way through the entanglements of philosophical disputations, if they were encouraged to look out upon the follies of life with satiric or reformatory intent, further steps in independence would seem an inevitable sequence. But such steps were not only not taken, they were not even foreseen. Nor did the most advanced men and women make any claims extending beyond the freedom to read, write, and think according to their own desires. Home duties and relationships remained unchanged. Bathsua Makin said that higher education was not designed to make wives self-assertive, but more reasonably and intelligently submissive. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Astell, the two most advanced and independent women of their day, are at one with the theory of the divinely ordained headship of man. Their bitterness of tone contains no thought of change, no hint of rebellion. Women were still under the dominion of fathers and husbands. The difference was that these fathers and husbands were in numerous instances willing to accord a very much enlarged freedom. But the next step was not taken by virtue of which the final right of decision as to her own thought and action would have belonged to the woman herself.

There was, furthermore, no claim made by women for any part in public life. Mary Wollstonecraft's suffrage programme of 1791, mild as it was, would have seemed to Mary Astell an incredible overturning of feminine ideals. Mary Astell and her congeners could not see that the putting of educational weapons into the hands of women was a concession carrying with it all later demands of feminism. The advocates of higher education for women were blind to the potentialities of the situation. There was no immediate following-up of theory into action. The idea of woman as a self-sufficing, self-directing individuality, responsible for her own destiny, and capable of playing an important part in civic and national affairs, did not come into clear outline until two centuries after Mary Astell's pronunciamento. In the period before 1760 we become aware of a moving on the waters. We are conscious of a great stir of preparation as for a crisis. Many paths converge towards one goal, but no goal is reached. Plans and achievements and favorable utterances seem to halt in mid-air.

A detailed study of the various ways in which women sought for fuller and richer intellectual life shows in what isolation they worked, with what lack of leadership, with what a depressing sense of the futility of their uncoÖrdinated efforts. The beginnings of the new ideals for women were so modest and unassuming, so casual, so without self-consciousness, that at the time they could hardly be recognized as beginnings. Evidences of a new vitality appear in the retrospect as numerous and promising, but in reality each thinker of new thoughts stood out alone, a solitary champion, scarcely realizing that in other parts of the field other champions were fighting under the same banners. We can now bring together many rather advanced statements in favor of educating girls. But these were often mere passing isolated utterances. There was nothing like an organized propaganda, no body of public opinion growing steadily in mass and power till it became dominant. There are hundreds of blades pushing up through the dark earth, but the field is never quite ripe for harvest. There is so much reasoning, so much able thought, so much sincerity of feeling and aspiration, and there are so many women reaching out into new mental realms, that a decisive revolution of opinion seems often imminent. But the world listens unconvinced, and in the actual affairs of life apparently applies the old standards.

What was actually accomplished in the century before 1760 was a lavish sowing of seed, a steady infiltration of new ideas, a breaking up of old certainties as to woman's place in domestic and civic life, and an accumulation of examples proving women capable of the most varied intellectual aptitudes and energies.

THE END