People did not care for flocks and herds, except perhaps as a distant ornament of the landscape. The King of Naples and the Cardinal of Amboise kept peacocks and stags. Anne of France founded a sort of Zoological Garden in which she acclimatised turkeys and bred parrots. But that had nothing to do with aesthetics. From country life we naturally proceed to the grave question of the utility of physical exercises for women—a question much more difficult to decide than appears at first sight. Suppose a number of old-style French châtelaines, sun-baked, inured to the inclemencies of the weather, dashing huntswomen, had been asked to relinquish violent exercises like hunting, fencing, boxing, tennis, on the ground that to indulge in them was to waste their charm? They would have ridiculed the idea. And yet, after mature deliberation, the Urbino coterie decided that these exercises were altogether incompatible with the feminine temperament. One had to come to Lyons to find a pretty and clever woman like Louise Labé posing as Bradamante or Marphise, and boasting of her riding and her skill with the lance. Every well-born Italian woman detested such mannish ways. When Charles VIII. arrived at Naples, the princess of Melphi, to humour the barbarian’s tastes, presented to him her daughter on horseback, but mounted in such a manner “as not to do wrong to her sex.” Here there is a problem in pure aesthetics. Not that women like Isabella d’Este and others are deficient in energy; when need arises they will give proof of an extraordinary vigour; Margaret of France, in her passion for serving her brother, bestrode a horse and galloped to the Spanish frontier with a speed and endurance that the postal service has rarely attained. But if, impelled by strong feeling, they accomplished feats like this, they did not boast of them. What charm would Margaret with all her heroism have for us if we had to see her flying with loose rein astraddle on her nag? It is impossible to cite a military woman of a more energetic temperament than Catherine Sforza: when did she shrink from sleeping on the bare ground and passing her nights in the open air? Yet this was the lady who, when she had a minute’s peace, solemnly dispatched a Jewish old-clo’ man to her neighbours, to discover for her a certain down for bed-ticks which was reputed exceptionally soft.