This was a clear enough scheme of life. In Spain the same ideas obtained so striking a success that people were not satisfied with the compromise devised by Anne of France, and with this wholly moral education which would leave the daughter for a few short years to her mother. Circumstances were urgent; there was no time to waste; ideas were at boiling-point: a part of the ancient principles, the physical and moral repose recommended by the physicians, was sacrificed, and the children were flung headlong into the whirlpool. Little girls sucked in Latin with their mother’s milk; then, the soul being expropriated, so to speak, for the public good, they were given a tutor at an age when they ought to have been learning nothing but how to walk; at seven they were expected to be able to maintain a conversation, and at thirteen to have finished their studies and be ripe for matrimony. This programme, so vigorous that at first blush one would be tempted to think it a mere figment of the imagination, was not only propounded but largely practised by one of the most conspicuous men of the time—Vivès, the tutor of Isabella the Catholic’s daughters. Vivès went to England in the train of Catherine of Aragon, and in that country of matter-of-fact aspirations he could still have believed himself in Spain, so successful was he in rousing the same fire and enthusiasm for his ideas. His fervour led to a revolution, or rather, as Erasmus said with a smile, to a “topsy-turvydom” in high society; the men, who continued to scour the seas and do business in great waters, fell quite to the rear, while the young ladies, stepping to the front, engaged with a brisk rivalry in marvellous exhibitions of precocity. At thirteen, Lady Jane Grey read Plato in the original, and Mary Stuart delivered in public her first Latin speech; at fourteen, Queen Elizabeth translated a work by Margaret of France, _The Mirror of the Sinful Soul_. These wonderfully clever children were not confined to any particular country, and the same breeze fanned the same flame from John o’ Groats to Gibraltar. Saint Theresa, who was born in 1515, is an excellent type of her contemporaries. Bereft of her mother, and one of a family of twelve, she was certainly not the object of any special training, but kept pace with girls of her age; yet at six years she was already, to use her own expression, “swept away by a violent movement of love,” and had to be prevented from hurrying to Africa in the hope of being massacred and winning heaven cheaply. What singular girls!