"J'ai trouvé votre lettre fort à mon gré—je la montrerai à madame, si je puis; quant à la peinture, je l'enverrai querir à Paris; elle est belle et bien avisée, et de bonne grâce, mais nourrie en la plus maudite et corrompue compagnie qui fut jamais, car je n'en vois point qui ne s'en sente. Votre cousine la marquise (l'épouse du jeune Prince de Condé) en est tellement changée qu'il n'y a apparence de religion en elle; si non d'autant qu'elle ne va point à la messe; car au reste de sa façon de vivre, hormis l'idolâtrie, elle fait comme les Papistes; et ma soeur la Princesse (de Condé) encore pis. Je vous l'écris privément, le porteur vous dira comme le roi s'émancipe—c'est pitié; je ne voudrois pour chose du monde que vous y fussiez pour y demeurer. Voilà pourquoi je désire vous marier, et que vous et votre femme vous vous retiriez de cette corruption; car encore que je la croyois bien grande, je la trouve encore davantage. Ce ne sont pas les hommes ici qui prient les femmes—ce sont les femmes qui prient les hommes; si vous y étiez, vous n'en échapperiez jamais sans une grande grâce de Dieu."
Thus women were alternately tools and plotters, idols and slaves. The ornaments of a court became the scourges of a nation; their influence was an influence made up of falsehood, made up of cruelty, made up of intrigue, of passions the most unbridled, and of vices the most detestable, and it seems to the student of history, in this wild and dreadful era as if all that was generous, upright, noble, and benevolent—as if faith and honour, and humanity and justice, were foreign and unnatural to the heart of man. But let us turn to our author.
"But the times were about to change. The great and stirring contests in religion and politics, which had given such scope to the deep fervour of the British character, subsided, as if the actors were breathless from their past exertions. The struggle for freedom sank into acquiescence in the dominion of the most worthless of mankind; and zeal for religion fled before the spirit of banter and sneer. The enthusiasm of 'fierce wars and faithful loves,' of piety and of freedom, were succeeded by the reign of profligacy and levity.
"During that disastrous period, the sordid and servile vices seem to have kept pace with the wildest licentiousness; and the dark and stern persecutions in Scotland form a fearful contrast with the bacchanalian revels of the court. The effects on the character and estimation of the female sex, sustain all that has been said upon the connexion of their interests with the elevation of morals. It became the habit to satirize and despise them, and on this they have never entirely recovered. The demoralization which led to it was, indeed, too much opposed to the temper of the English to be permanent; but women, for a long time after, ceased to keep pace with their age. Notwithstanding the numerous exceptions which must always have existed in a free and populous country like England, where literature had made progress, it is certain, that in the days of Pope and Addison, the women, in general, were grossly ignorant.
"The tone of gallantry and deference which had arisen from chivalry, still remained on the surface, but its language was that of cold, unmeaning flattery; and, from being the arbiters of honour, they became the mere ministers of amusement. They were again consigned to that frivolity, into which they relapse as easily as men do into ferocity. The respect they inspired, was felt individually or occasionally, but not for their sex. Any thing serious addressed to them, was introduced with an apology, or in the manner we now address children whom we desire to flatter. They were treated and considered as grown children. In the writings addressed to them expressly for their instruction in morals, or the conduct of life, though with the sincerest desire for their welfare, nothing is proposed to them that can either exalt their sentiments, invigorate their judgment, or give them any desire to leave the world better than they found it. They inculcated little beyond the views and the duties of a decent servant. Views and duties, indeed, very commendable as far as they go, but lamentable when offered as the standard of morals and thought for half the human species; that half too, on whom chiefly depends the first, the often unalterable, bent given to the character of the whole."
The dignity of character which rivets our attention on the "high dames and gartered knights" of the days of Elizabeth, the simplicity and earnestness and lofty feeling, which lent grace to prejudice and chastened error into virtue, were exchanged, in the days of Charles II., for undisguised corruption and insatiable venality, for license without generosity, persecution without faith, and luxury without refinement. Grammont's animated Mémoires are a complete, and, from the happy unconsciousness of the writer to the vices he portrays, a faithful picture of the court, to which the description Polydore Virgil gives of a particular family, "nec vir fortis nec foemina casta," was almost literally applicable.
Various as are the beauties of style with which this work abounds—beauties which, to borrow the phrase of Cicero, rise as naturally from the subject as a flower from its stem—we doubt whether it contains a more felicitous illustration than that which we are about to quote. The reader must bear in mind that the object of the writer is to establish the proposition, that there is an average inferiority of women to men in certain qualities, which, slight as it may appear, or altogether as it may vanish, in particular instances, is, on the whole, incontestable, and according to which the transactions of daily life are distributed.
"All inconvenience is avoided by a slight inferiority of strength and abilities in one of the sexes. This gradually develops a particular turn of character, a new class of affections and sentiments that humanize and embellish the species more than any others. These lead at once, without art or hesitation, to a division of duties, needed alike in all situations, and produce that order without which there can be no social progression. In the treatise of The Hand, by Sir Charles Bell, we learn that the left hand and foot are naturally a little weaker than the right; the effect of this is, to make us more prompt and dexterous than we should otherwise be. If there were no difference at all between the right and left limbs, the slight degree of hesitation which hand to use or which foot to put forward, would create an awkwardness that would operate more or less every moment of our lives, and the provision to prevent it seems analogous to the difference nature has made between the strength of the sexes."
The domain of woman is the horizon where heaven and earth meet—a sort of land debatable between the confines where positive institutions end and intellectual supremacy begins. It includes the whole region over which politeness should extend, as well as a large portion of the territories over which the fine arts hold their sway.
Those lighter and more shifting features which elude the grasp of the moralist, and escape the pencil of the historian, though they impress upon every age a countenance and expression of its own, it is her undoubted province to survey. Consequently, if not for the