It would have been no matter, had not genius set its seal on the work, and so made it doubtful whether history has any Hypatia left. We must not fail to utter constant protest against such unfairness; and to assert again and again, that not a single weakness or folly attributed to Hypatia by the novelist--neither the worship of Venus Anadyomene nor the prospective marriage with the Roman governor, neither the superstitious fears, the ominous self-conceit, nor the half conscious personal ambition--is in the least sustained by the facts of history. She was pure and stainless: let us see to it that such memories are rescued. And there is still another name, deeply wronged by the prejudice and party spirit of the past, which it is quite possible to redeem: I mean that of Aspasia. For many centuries, the very sound of it suggested an image of all womanly grace and genius, devoid of womanly virtue; the insight of a seer, the eloquence of an orator, but the voluptuousness of a courtesan. Very lately, the manly justice of Thirlwall and Grote, and the exquisite taste and imagination of Walter Savage Landor, have striven to repair the wrong. Her reputation fell a victim to the gross puns of Aristophanes, himself the hired mouth-piece of a political party that hated her, and whose misrepresentations were so contemptible in the eyes of Pericles, that he would not interfere to prevent them. Would you have the history of that immortal marriage written truly? Imagine the Greek ruler married, for some years, to a woman of the noblest Athenian blood, already the mother of two children, but one who, if irreproachable in conduct, was utterly incapable of taking in the scope of his plans, or sharing his lofty, adventurous thought. After years of weariness passed in her society, with no rest for his heart and no inspiration for his genius, there came to Athens a woman and a foreigner, in whom he found his peer,--a woman who gathered round her in a moment all that there was of free and noble in that world of poetry, statesmanship, and art. She was from the islands of the Archipelago, and, like the women of her country, walked the streets with her face unveiled.