future:[444] but it was something of this joy which was reserved for their descendants who saw the rise of Newnham and Girton. It was, indeed, not to two but to four noble and devoute countesses[445] that Cambridge owed its most efficient co-operation in the great periods which mark its history--the dawn of the renascence in the xiv, the threshold of our modern life in the xv, and the consolidation of the religious movement in the xvi century:[446] and if Queens’ College was built by Margaret of Anjou “to laud and honneure of sexe femenine” Cambridge has repaid her by extending the significance of her ambition. The women’s colleges which we now see did not, then, begin the connexion of women and the university, they completed it. It is a curious thing when one looks down a list of Cambridge benefactors to find that from a college to a common room fire, from a professorship to a Cambridge “chest,” from the chapel to a new college to the buttress of a falling college, from a university preacher to a belfry,[447] the names of women never fail to appear as benefactors, but appear in no other way. Not once until the xix century did any woman benefit from the learning which her sex had done so much to inaugurate, to sustain and consolidate. In the year 1867 the idea of founding a woman’s college and of associating the higher education of women with the university of Cambridge began to take shape.[448] No movement of the century, it may confidently be affirmed, has done so much to increase the happiness of women, and none has opened to them so many new horizons. If men look back on the years spent at the university as among the happiest in their lives, so that everything in later life which recalls their _alma mater_--not excluding the London terminus from which they always “went up”--borrows some of its glamour, the university life meant all this, and more, for women. To begin with it repaired a traditional injustice, the absence of any standard of individual life especially for the unmarried; the neglect of every personal interest, talent, or ambition, which a woman might have apart from looking after her own or other people’s children. The Reformation, in itself, had done singularly little for women. Puritan views were of the kind patronised by a Sir Willoughby Patterne, and no step had been made towards recognising women’s claims as individuals since the days when convents had in some measure certainly admitted these, a fact which probably sufficed to make the convent turn the scale on the side of happiness.