It is even a not wholly disagreeable surprise to meet in an odd place here and there one’s own ideas, which have flitted away and found warm foster-parents in people who have so far adopted them as to believe them their own. Sometimes it is another writer who is good enough to saddle himself with them thus, and in that case our feeling is not perhaps unalloyed pleasure; but if it is a reader, man or woman, we are well rewarded. Often, too, our idea as it goes round has altered in feature, and if it now and then appears to us enfeebled, it also happens sometimes to have gained strength. Everyone cannot be a writer! ‘Amateurs’ have a rôle of their own, which is not that of ‘stickit’ authors—a rôle of synthesis, generalisation, criticism, support, sanction! The end we pursue—thought, namely, and truth—can only be attained by the aid of conversation,—only if distinguished and enthusiastic women set themselves to distil from our books any good they may contain, and to diffuse its essence around them. From this almost indispensable collaboration between pure learning and its popular interpretation results a vigorous life. As Madame d’Haussonville has so well said: “An eager desire for knowledge possessed the entire sixteenth century. The quick and supple intellect of the women was carried away in the general current. Erudition was the passion of the age, not that cold and microscopic erudition which arises in ages of decadence, and which is often only the useless lumber of scholastic pedantry, but an erudition living, intelligent, and animated”—animated, that is by aestheticism. By the side of exquisites like Bembo, laborious students like Lefèvre d’Etaples, Hebraists, and exegetists cultivating their little patch with dogged tenacity, there were brilliant minds, perhaps more brilliant than profound, but unprejudiced, who synthetised particular studies and started them on an unlooked-for career. For the Hebraists, exegetists, philosophers, and historians of every description, the spread of intelligence would of course have been fatal; but it was the _raison d’être_ of a lady whose mission was to put in circulation the results of her individual study. Thus the aim which women had to set before themselves in their reading was twofold: first, a personal, aesthetic aim, the reinvigoration and refreshment of their own souls; secondly, an aim relating to their apostolic mission, the art of understanding men’s souls, then of charming and leading them by means of conversation. But it is impossible, by merely scanning a man’s bookshelves, to form an idea of the man. In great houses, the king’s, for example, some of the books were inherited, others were presents, others were books that no gentleman’s library could have been without. Francis I. bought the Italian novelties, Bembo, Pontanus, and Politian. In reality his chief reading was the Arthurian romances.