When, from the Niger, we approach toward the East, the African women degenerate in stature, complexion, sensibility, and chastity. Even their language, like their features, and the soil they inhabit, is harsh and disagreeable. Their pleasures resemble more the transports of fury, than the gentle emotions communicated by agreeable sensations. GREAT ENTERPRISES OF WOMEN IN THE TIMES OF CHIVALRY. The times and the manners of chivalry, by bringing great enterprises, bold adventures, and extravagant heroism into fashion, inspired the women with the same taste. The two sexes always imitate each other. Their manners and their minds are refined or corrupted, invigorated or dissolved together. The women, in consequence of the prevailing passion, were now seen in the middle of camps and of armies. They quitted the soft and tender inclinations, and the delicate offices of their own sex, for the courage, and the toilsome occupations of ours. During the crusades, animated by the double enthusiasm of religion and of valor, they often performed the most romantic exploits. They obtained indulgences on the field of battle, and died with arms in their hands, by the side of their lovers, or of their husbands. In Europe, the women attacked and defended fortifications. Princesses commanded their armies, and obtained victories. Such was the celebrated Joan de Mountfort, disputing for her duchy of Bretagne, and engaging the enemy herself. Such was the still more celebrated Margaret of Anjou, queen of England and wife of Henry VI. She was active and intrepid, a general and a soldier. Her genius for a long time supported her feeble husband, taught him to conquer, replaced him upon the throne, twice relieved him from prison, and though oppressed by fortune and by rebels, she did not yield, till she had decided in person twelve battles. The warlike spirit among the women, consistent with ages of barbarism, when every thing is impetuous because nothing is fixed, and when all excess is the excess of force, continued in Europe upwards of four hundred years, showing itself from time to time, and always in the middle of convulsions, or on the eve of great revolutions. But there were eras and countries, in which that spirit appeared with particular lustre. Such were the displays it made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Hungary, and in the Islands of the Archipelago and the Mediterranean, when they were invaded by the Turks.