‘Ladies and Gentlewomen of England.’ Nor was there anything new in this. The lady sat in her bower to read Sidney’s _Arcadia_ as in olden times she had listened in the hall to the lay of the minstrel. It was still her part to assign the prize of romance as of valour. The leisure which made the enjoyment of tale and song possible was essentially the lot of the rich and noble lady, who neither toiled nor span, but did a more useful work as guardian of art and literature. The amazing discovery that ‘Books are a part of man’s prerogative’[3] had not yet been made; there is certainly not a hint of it in Shakespeare. Nor could such a doctrine possibly originate under a queen, who, whatever her faults, cultivated learning herself and honoured it in others. Our thoughts linger lovingly over that noblest age of English story, when romanticism and classicism joined their glories for a brief space; when the courtier was both knight and scholar, and the noble dame’s epitaph praised her as ‘wise and fair and good.’ Seen through the haze of the past, its splendours stand out in even greater dimension, while all that was small and weak is obscured to dimness. The very age that followed served as a foil to throw into yet brighter relief ‘the spacious days of great Elizabeth.’ It is significant of the rapid degeneration that ensued, that though between the accession of Henry VIII. and the death of James I., 353 grammar schools were founded in England, not one was added to the number after 1625. The seventeenth century was a gloomy period for England. If Elizabeth had given her country peace and glory, the Stuarts were not long in reversing the position. Disastrous civil wars, political and theological quarrels, absorbed the best energies of the nation. The Cavaliers were too frivolous, the Roundheads too grimly earnest to spare much leisure for learning. In times of war and national peril woman’s influence is apt to wane, and such power as they had at the Stuart court was not of the kind to encourage intellectual pursuits. When a scholar was hardly accounted a gentleman, a lady might be pardoned for neglecting her intellectual charms. It became the fashion among men to decry female students, to bid them put away their books and learn to wash and cook instead. ‘I like not a female poetess at any hand,’ says one of these self-appointed critics. This attitude was characteristic of the decline of chivalry and the degradation of woman’s position. ‘There is not so much as a Don Quixote of the quill left,’ writes Mary Astell in 1694, ‘to succour the distressed damsels.’ The age of courtesy being over, women must help themselves, and she takes up the cudgels for her sex. ‘A man ought no more to value himself on being wiser than a woman,’ she remarks pertinently, ‘if he owes his advantage to a better education and greater means of information, than he ought to boast of courage for beating a man when his hands were bound.’[4] Hers is the old thesis,