Others, maintained by a more subtle father, are commissioned “to attain unto the virtue and honour that knowledge gains for gentlemen.”[75] Ah! the gay young sparks! They proceed, at great expense, to establish themselves at Padua, Bologna, or elsewhere, and there the lore they gather comes from profound study of Signora Angela’s ankles or Signora Camilla’s bright eyes. One of these pious youths, the son of a councillor of Paris, dismissed post-haste the private tutor accompanying him. So long as the lad’s purse holds out, the father proves indulgent, and indeed is secretly not a little proud of his heir’s escapades. Boys will be boys. One facetious father addresses a letter to his son “studying at Padua—or sent to study.” Many people attributed the wildness of young men to the fact that their education was not directed by women. Calvin considers that the young men were thrown too much into women’s society; Henri Estienne[76] charges upon aesthetic education all the vices of the age. This is going a little too far: it would be just as reasonable to make the vices of the age responsible for the bad results of education. As a matter of fact, notwithstanding a certain measure of progress, the education of the sixteenth century did commit errors for which it had to pay. Discipline was relaxed.[77] It was a common complaint that studies lost tone as they became more general;[78] the new education took its pupils too young, forced them remorselessly through too extensive curricula, encouraged them to be content with a smattering, gave them the habit of not going deep into anything, and made shallow and paradoxical men. Two women who were the products of the most opposite principles, Louise of Savoy and Anne of France, were on their guard against this error. The one determined to have her son educated under her own eyes, the other undertook the education of her future son-in-law—a clear proof that all women cannot be charged with particular faults. However paradoxical the idea may appear, it seems that the system of education ought to have been more completely revolutionised. Either the old principle of bringing boys up so as to make men of them should have been maintained, or a new one should have been boldly and frankly enunciated, namely, that it would be well for a boy to be brought up by his mother, since he is to live with a woman, and a girl by her father, since she is to live with a man. Of this principle, however, we nowhere find the slightest hint. In this education there would have been something more intimate, more just, more natural, and perhaps more profitable. You can tell among a thousand the men who have been brought up by a serious mother, and the women brought up by a careful father.