Seneca took the part of women, exclaiming:--'By no means believe that their souls are inferior to ours, or that they are less endowed with the virtues. As for honour, it is equally great and energetic among them.' A foreign lady was surprised at beholding the equality established between the men and women at Sparta; whereupon the wife of Leonidas, the King of Sparta, said to her:--'Do you not know that it is we who bring forth the men? It is not the fathers, but the mothers, that effectually form the heart.' Napoleon seems to have formed what may be called a professional estimate of women. When the demonstrative Madame de Stael asked him--evidently expecting him to pay her a compliment--'Whom do you think the greatest woman dead or alive?' Napoleon replied, 'Her, Madame, _WHO HAS BORNE MOST SONS_.' Nettled by this sarcastic reply, she returned to the charge, observing, 'It is said you are not friendly to the sex.' Napoleon was her match again; 'Madame,' he exclaimed, 'I am passionately fond of my wife;' and off he walked. Assuredly it would not mend matters in this world (or the next) if all men were Napoleons and all women de Staels. If we consider the question in other points of view, have there been, proportionally, fewer celebrated women than illustrious men? fewer great queens than truly great kings? Compare, on all sides, the means and the circumstances; count the reigns, and decide. The fact is that this question has been argued only by tyrannical or very silly men, who found it difficult to get rid of the absurd prejudices which retain the finest half of human nature in slavery, and condemn it to obscurity under the pretext that it is essentially corrupted. Towards the end of the 15th century a certain demented writer attempted to prove that women do not even deserve the title of reasonable creatures, which in the original sounds oddly enough, namely, _probare nititur mulieres non homines esse_. Another, a very learned Jesuit, endeavoured to demonstrate that women have no souls! Some say that women surpass us in wickedness; others, that they are both worse and better than men. That morbid wretch, Alexander Pope, said, 'Every woman is at heart a rake;' and a recent writer in the _Times_ puts more venom in the dictum by saying, 'Every woman is (or likes) at heart a rake.' Both these opinions may be set down as mere claptrap, witty, but vile.