Elizabeth, however, was a unique personality and had few imitators. The literature of her day abounds with expressions of supreme humility and loyalty from the one sex to the other. Elizabethan poets deigned to play at captivity and subjection to the overwhelming charms of Saccharissa and her sisters, and turned pretty phrases about her cruelty, but this was merely poetic license of expression. All serious, unaffected expression of conviction, such as was to be found in the religious writings of the time, and in the voluminous private correspondence, which gives us the most accurate description obtainable of the real actions and opinions of our ancestors, never suggested a doubt of man's natural and inalienable superiority, mental, moral, and physical. So undisturbed was this conviction, down almost to our own day, that the heresy of Mary Wollstonecraft gave the severest of shocks to her own generation. So heinous seemed her offence of _lèse-majesté_ in questioning man's divine right that one of the most famous of her contemporaries did not hesitate to stigmatize her as "a hyena in petticoats." History gives us but one record of a general outbreak. In the thirteenth century the Crusades had so drained Europe of its able-bodied men that the women were forced to apply themselves to the abandoned trades and neglected professions. They shortly became so intoxicated by the sense of their own competency and power that when the weary wearers of the cross returned from the East they were at first delighted to discover that their affairs were prospering almost as well as ever, and then amazed and disgusted to find the women reluctant to yield up to their natural rulers these usurped privileges. Stern measures were necessary to oust them. Severe laws were enacted against the admission of women into the Guilds--the labour organizations which at that period governed all the avenues of industrial advancement; and the doors of the professions were peremptorily slammed in the women's faces. Such episodes as these, however, were detached and accidental. Female treason never dared unrebuked to lift its horrid head until within the present generation.