and Chesterfield, writing to his son, treats women with similar contempt.... 'A man of sense,' he says, 'only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them as he does with a sprightly, forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters, though he often makes them believe that he does both, which is the thing in the world that they are proud of.... No flattery is either too high or too low for them. They will greedily swallow the highest and gratefully accept of the lowest.' Nearly twenty years passed, and then Chesterfield wrote in the same contemptuous way of women in a letter to his godson, a 'dear little boy' of ten. 'In company every woman is every man's superior, and must be addressed with respect, nay, more, with flattery, and you need not fear making it too strong ... it will be greedily swallowed.' Even Addison, while trying to instruct the 'Fair Sex' as he likes to call them, apparently regarded its members as an inferior order of beings. He delights to dwell upon their foibles, on their dress, and on the thousand little artifices practised by the flirt and the coquette. Here is the view the Queen Anne moralist takes of the 'female world' he was so eager to improve: 'I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains in finding out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements seem contrived for them, rather as they are women, than as they are reasonable creatures; and are more adapted to the sex than to the species. The toilet is their great scene of business, and the right adjustment of their hair the principal employment of their lives. The sorting of a suit of ribands is considered a very good morning's work; and if they make an excursion to a mercer's or a toy-shop, so great a fatigue makes them unfit for anything else all the day after. Their more serious occupations are sewing and embroidery, and their greatest drudgery the preparations of jellies and sweetmeats. This I say is the state of ordinary women; though I know there are multitudes of those that move in an exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, that join all the beauties of the mind to the ornaments of dress, and inspire a kind of awe and respect as well as of love into their male beholders.' The qualification made at the end of this description does not greatly lessen the significance of the earlier portion, which is Addison's picture, as he is careful to tell us of 'ordinary women.' Much must be allowed for the exaggeration of a humourist, but the frivolity of women is a theme upon which Addison harps continually. Indeed, were it not for this weakness in the 'feminine world' half his vocation as a moralist in the _Spectator_ would be gone, and if the general estimate in his Essays of the women with whom he was acquainted be to any extent a correct one, the derogatory language used by men of letters, and especially by Swift, Prior, Pope, and Chesterfield may be almost forgiven.