of the Roman satirist,) which the daughters of the South borrowed from their Celtic and German neighbours, seems especially to have excited their indignation. Tertullian, in his treatise "De Cultu Foeminarum," declaims with his usual fiery rhetoric against this habit. "I see some women," says the African, "who dye their hair with yellow; they are ashamed of their very nation, that they are not the natives of Gaul or Germany. Evil and most disastrous to them is the omen which their fiery head portends, while they consider such abomination graceful." This charitable hint of future reprobation, savage as it appears, seems to have been much admired by the Fathers; it is repeated by St Jerome and St Cyprian with equal triumph. Well, indeed, might Theophilus of Antioch, in his letter to Autolycus, place the Christian opinions concerning women in startling contrast with the revolting scheme proposed in relation to them by the most refined philosopher of antiquity. Well might the matrons of Antioch refuse to gratify Julian by a sacrifice to gods whose votaries had steeped their sex in impurity and degradation. The death of Hypatia is indeed a blot in Christian annals, but she fell the victim of an infuriated multitude; and how often had the Proconsul and the Emperor beheld, unmoved, the arena wet with the blood of Christian virgins, and the earth blackened with their ashes! Indeed, the deference paid to weakness is the grand maxim, the practical application of which, in spite of some fantastic notions, and some most pernicious errors that accompanied it, entitles chivalry to our veneration, and prevented the dark ages from being one scene of unmixed violence and oppression. The flashes of generosity that gild with a momentary splendour the dreadful scenes of feudal tyranny, were struck out by the force of this principle acting upon the most rugged nature in the most superstitious ages. While the fire that had consumed the surprised city was slaked in the blood of its miserable inhabitants, the distress of high-born beauty, or the remonstrances of the defenceless priest, often arrested the career of the warrior, who viewed the slaughter of unoffending peasants and of simple burghers with as much indifference as that of the wild-boar or the red-deer which it was his pastime and his privilege to destroy. Who does not remember the beautiful passage in Tasso, where the crusaders burst into tears at the sight of the holy sepulchre?-- "Nudo ciascuno il pie calca il sentiero, Ch'l'esempio de duci ogn' altromuove Serico fregio d'or, piuma e criniero Superbo dal suo capo ognon rimuove, _E d'insieme del cor l'abito altero Depone, e calde e pie lagrime piove_." We now enter into the main object of the work, the condition of women in modern times; and the passage which introduces the subject is so luminous and eloquent, that we cannot resist the pleasure of laying it before our readers without mutilation.