[83] Letter XLIX, London, Sept. 5, O. S., 1748.
Walpole, writing in 1773, makes the following curious declaration: "I made a discovery—Lady Nuneham is a poetess, and writes with great ease and sense some poetry, but is as afraid of the character, as if it was a sin to make verses." And Lord Granville tells us of an eminent statesman and man of letters who, in the early part of the last century, was so troubled on discovering in his daughter a talent for poetry that he "appealed to her affection for him, and made a request to her never to write verses again. He was not afraid of her becoming a good poetess, but he was afraid of the disadvantages which were likely to be suffered by her, if she were supposed to be a lady of literary attainments."
[84] It was Swift who had such a low opinion of woman's intellect that in writing to one of his fair correspondents he told her that she could "never arrive in point of learning to the perfection of a schoolboy." Lady Pennington, strange to say, seems to have shared his views, for in a manual of advice to young ladies, she declares: "A sensible woman will soon be convinced that all the learning the utmost application can make her master of will be in many points inferior to that of the schoolboy." "At the time the Tatler first appeared in the female world any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured," and it was then considered "more important for a woman to dance a minuet well than to know a foreign language."
[85] The wife of President John Adams, descended from the most illustrious colonial families, writing in 1817, regarding the educational opportunities of the girls of her time and rank, expressed herself as follows:
"Female education in the best families went no farther than writing and arithmetic, and, in some few and rare instances, music and dancing." According to her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, "The only chance for much intellectual improvement in the female sex was to be found in the families of the educated class, and in occasional intercourse with the learned of the day. Whatever of useful instruction was secured in the practical conduct of life came from maternal lips; and, what of farther mental development depended more upon the eagerness with which the casual teachings of daily conversation were treasured up than upon any labor expended purposely to promote it." Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife, Abigail Adams, During the Revolution, With a Memoir of Mrs. Adams, by Charles Francis Adams, pp. X and XI, New York, 1876.
[86] When the students of Girton and Newnham in 1897, after passing the Cambridge examinations—many of them with the highest honors—applied for degrees, "the undergraduate world was stirred to a fine frenzy of wrath against all womankind," and an astonished world saw re-enacted scenes scarcely less disgraceful than those which characterized the riotous demonstrations which, seventeen years before, had greeted seven young women at the portals of the University of Edinburgh.
[87] The Queen's Reign, Chap. V, London, 1897.
[88] Proposition third, of her Propositiones Philosophicæ, Milan, 1738, reads as follows:
"Optime etiam de universa Philosophia infirmiorem sexum meruisse nullus infirmabitur; nam præter septuaginta fere eruditissimas, Mulieres, quas recenset Menagius, complures alias quovis tempore floruisse novimus, quæ in philosophicis disciplinis maximam ingenii laudem sunt assecutæ. Ad omnem igitur doctrinam, eruditionemque etiam muliebres animos Natura comparavit: quare paulo injuriosius cum feminis agunt qui eis bonarum artium cultu omnino interdicunt, eo vel maxime, quod hæc illarum studia privatis, publicisque rebus non modo haud noxia futura sint verum etiam perutilia."
This admirable work, with its one hundred and ninety-one propositions, is commended to those who may have any doubt regarding the learning or capacity of the Italian women who have been referred to in the preceding pages.