"I think men praised them," said Jenny, "and that we remember the praise, not the works. For instance, Roswitha, or Olympia Morata, or Vittoria Colonna. Vittoria's sonnets are extant, but we only value them as being hers, more for what she _was_ than for their intrinsic merit." "And," added Eleonora, "men did not suppress Hannah More, or Joanna Baillie. You know Scott thought Miss Baillie's dramas would rank with Shakespeare's." Mrs. Tallboys was better read in logic and mathematics than in history, and did not follow Jenny, but she turned her adversary's argument to her own advantage, by exclaiming, "Are the gentlemen present familiar with these bright lights?" "I confess my ignorance of some of them," said Julius. "But my youngest brother knows all that," said Rosamond at a brave venture. "Macaulay's school-boy," murmured Lady Tyrrell, softly. "Let us return to the main point," said Mrs. Tallboys, a little annoyed. "It is of the present and future that I would speak, not of the past." "Does not the past give the only data on which to form a conclusion?" said Julius. "Certainly not. The proposition is not what a woman or two in her down-trodden state may have exceptionally effected, but her natural equality, and in fact superiority, in all but the physical strength which has imposed an unjust bondage on the higher nature." "I hardly know where to meet you if you reject all arguments from proved facts," said Julius. "And the Bible. Why don't you say the Bible?" exclaimed his wife in an undertone; but Mrs. Tallboys took it up and said, "The precepts of Scripture are founded on a state of society passed away. You may find arguments for slavery there." "I doubt that," said Julius. "There are practical directions for an existing state of things, which have been distorted into sanction for its continuance. The actual precepts are broad principles, which are for all times, and apply to the hired servant as well as to the slave. So again with the relations of man and wife; I can nowhere find a command so adapted to the seclusion and depression of the Eastern woman as to be inapplicable to the Christian matron. And the typical virtuous woman, the valiant woman, is one of the noblest figures anywhere depicted." "I know," said Mrs. Tallboys, who had evidently been waiting impatiently again to declaim, "that men, even ministers of religion, from Paul if you like downwards, have been willing enough to exalt woman so long as they claim to sit above her. The higher the oppressed, so much higher the self-exaltation of the oppressor. Paul and Peter exalt their virtuous woman, but only as their own appendage, adorning themselves; and while society with religious ministers at the head of it call on woman to submit, and degrade the sex, we shall continue to hear of such disgraces to England as I see in your police reports--brutal mechanics beating their wives."