Often it is said that only a few of the daughters of the nobility had the opportunity for the higher education, and it is even the custom to declare that most of these were instances where fathers had expected sons instead of daughters and then raised the girls as companions and gave them the education that ordinarily was reserved for boys. George Eliot's picture of the times as given in "Romola," has sometimes emphasized this, and she herself seems not to have been quite able to persuade herself that there were liberal and abundant {319} opportunities for the education of women in Italy towards the end of the fifteenth century. It was so difficult in her (George Eliot's) time for a woman to obtain education that it was almost impossible to bring oneself to think of ample facilities existing nearly four centuries before. Anyone who reads Burckhardt, however, or indeed any of the modern writers on the Renaissance, will not be likely to think that education was reserved for single daughters of families, or that they indeed had any better opportunities than others except for the fact that family attention was centred on them as it is now. Burckhardt notes that it was especially the wives and daughters of the _condottieri,_ that is, of the hired leaders of armies, the self-made men of the time, who were lifting themselves up into positions of prominence, who were the most frequent among the educated women of the Renaissance. The records are complete enough to show that there was probably as much, if not more, feminine education in Italy at least than in our own time. This will probably be hard for many people to believe, but, as I have said, no important city was without it. What may be called the important cities of that time nearly all contained less than 100,000 inhabitants and many of them had not more than ten to twenty thousand. When one finds schools for the higher education of women in every one of these it is easy to understand how widely diffused the feminine movement was. Lest it should be thought that the education provided for or allowed the women of the time was narrow in its scope, with so many limitations that intellectual development in the true sense of the word was hampered, it may be as well to recall that women were even encouraged in the public display of their talents. We read of the young princesses and their court attendants taking part in Latin plays given before the Pope and other high ecclesiastics, as well as visiting rulers at this time. We have the story of Ippolita Sforza saluting Pope Pius II, who had been the scholarly AEneas Sylvius before his elevation to the pontificate, with a graceful Latin address when he came to the Congress at Mantua. Another of the oratorical princesses of the time was Battista Montefeltro, who is famous for addresses delivered on many important occasions. {320}