The doctrine we have just indicated never excited any very determined opposition as a theory; its adversaries reserved their objections for its practical working. The New Law, it is true, had redeemed us in love; but the politicians held the same opinions as the moralists of Du Four’s school. From Machiavelli to Calvin, many men thought the bludgeon a simpler and more effectual guide for humanity than sentiment. At best they would have favoured a sort of sentimental sociology. They regarded everything else as a mere philosophic dream—Eden, of which barely a glimpse had been caught before it was guarded by the angel with the terrible sword; the burning bush from which issued the voice of God, but near which Moses dared not kneel for fear his garments should take fire and the flame scorch his flesh. Assuredly, the practical science of platonism is more difficult than its metaphysic; it assumes that women have the knack of cleverly taming men by means of love’s blandishments, without getting scratched themselves. The cleverest lion-tamers are sometimes clawed, but they have been known to die in their beds. Here is the question in a nutshell: Are women capable of following this tamer’s vocation and making themselves sufficiently invulnerable? and secondly: Are men tamable? On the first point the friends of the beautiful displayed the utmost confidence. They made their appeal to women, sensitive—more than sensitive, refined—fortified by marriage against materialities, and inspired only with disgust by the vulgar vice that came under their eyes and even in their own circle. As Du Bellay says, Cato’s manners harmonised perfectly with Plato’s discourses. Margaret of France unhesitatingly descended into the den and grappled with her friend Bonnivet.[164] She believed in the invulnerability of women, as also did Castiglione and many others. The platonists found no difficulty in justifying their position; they cited heroic examples of feminine virtue even in the remotest antiquity, and they met other admirable examples in the ordinary intercourse of life. Castiglione and Dolce show us women who in the vilest environments were angels of chastity. In most cases they were young girls, for instance a poor girl of Capua (very often cited) who flung herself into a river to escape a troop of Gascons; a poor peasant girl of Mantua, who, betrayed by a scoundrel, drowned herself with a sort of frenzy, flinging away all the ropes held out to her—a tragic suicide, anti-Christian as such, yet so Christian in its grandeur of despair that the Bishop of Mantua proposed to erect a statue to this noble woman of the people. Unhappily he died before he could carry out his idea; in those days people fought shy of inartistic statues.