The foregoing pages will have enabled the reader to see how little the platonist women sought to exert a direct influence in affairs. They aimed rather at moral and social influence. In no sense were they women of action, believing likely enough that the course of events would become modified naturally when men had changed. Conforming to the aphorism, “Woman is supreme only as woman,” they devoted themselves to the skilful development of the sources of their superiority, leaving their inferiorities carefully in the shade. They avoided all masculine modes—the rustic sort of sexless unattractive women, most at home in the stables, strong-minded creatures who looked for a love they never inspired; they studiously left to men the keen-edged activities of life—law, politics, military service, all the needful barriers against social inundation. Louise of Savoy was almost the only woman who so far cherished the old ideas as to regret that she was a woman; who loved to play a part in politics, and whose intelligence and energy won praise in terms that recalled the great women of the past, notably Blanche of Castile. She was a realist of the old type, who had lovers as a matter of course, but gave scant thought to winning hearts: thus wholly differing from the new order of women. And yet, by a singular chance in the working of the old laws of monarchical succession, the world has perhaps never seen more women called to till the places of men in the sphere of statecraft. After all, monarchy is not a principle of pure reason: it is incapable of mathematical demonstration: it is a principle springing wholly from sentiment. Its advantage lies in this—that in a world of tragic pettiness it gives a nation something to love. Many women played important parts in these masculine struggles, among which they were thrown in their own despite. The period was one of constant turmoil, and they had no opportunity of enjoying a life of quiet secluded happiness. Among them was that unhappy mother, Isabella of Aragon, who was persecuted by Ludovico il Moro, the uncle, and, as some said, the assassin of her husband, and held captive in France by Louis XII.—a luckless, warm-hearted, valiant figure who, in the effort to win Milan back for her son, maintained a desperate struggle with the whole of Europe.