They followed Mr. Hippy to the library, where they found Anthelia alone. ‘Anthy,’ said Mr. Hippy, after the forms of introduction, ‘do you know you are accused of laying waste a pine-grove, and carrying it off by cartloads, with force and arms?’ Anthelia read Mr. Ratstail’s letter. ‘This is a very strange piece of folly,’ she said; ‘I hope it will not be a mischievous one.’ She then renewed the expressions of her gratitude to Sir Oran, and bade him welcome to Melincourt. Sir Oran bowed in silence. ‘Folly and mischief,’ said Mr. Fax, ‘are very nearly allied; and nowhere more conspicuously than in the forms of the law.’ _Mr. Forester._ You have an admirable library, Miss Melincourt: and I judge from the great number of Italian books, you are justly partial to the poets of that exquisite language. The apartment itself seems singularly adapted to the genius of their poetry, which combines the magnificent simplicity of ancient Greece with the mysterious grandeur of the feudal ages. Those windows of stained glass would recall to an enthusiastic mind the attendant spirit of Tasso; and the waving of the cedars beyond, when the wind makes music in their boughs, with the birds singing in their shades and the softened dash of the torrent from the dingle below, might with little aid from fancy be modulated into that exquisite combination of melody which flowed from the enchanted wood at the entrance of Rinaldo, and which Tasso has painted with a degree of harmony not less magical than the music he describes. Italian poetry is all fairyland: I know not any description of literature so congenial to the tenderness and delicacy of the female mind, which, however opposite may be the tendency of modern education, Nature has most pre-eminently adapted to be ‘a mansion for all lovely forms: a dwelling-place for all sweet sounds and harmonies.’[36] Of these, Italian poetry is a most inexhaustible fountain; and for that reason I could wish it to be generally acknowledged a point of the very first importance in female education. _Anthelia._ You have a better opinion of the understandings of women, sir, than the generality of your lordly sex seems disposed to entertain. _Mr. Forester._ The conduct of men, in this respect, is much like that of a gardener who should plant a plot of ground with merely ornamental flowers, and then pass sentence on the soil for not bearing substantial fruit. If women are treated only as pretty dolls, and dressed in all the fripperies of irrational education; if the vanity of personal adornment and superficial accomplishments be made from their very earliest years to suppress all mental aspirations, and to supersede all thoughts of intellectual beauty, is it to be inferred that they are incapable of better things? But such is the usual logic of tyranny, which first places its extinguisher on the flame, and then argues that it cannot burn.