Mary Astell's appeal had little effect, though it was immediately supported by no less powerful a writer than Defoe. It appears that Defoe had already (in 1692 and 1693) written his _Essay upon Projects_, and he published it in 1697. One of the score of projects he put before the country was a plea for the higher education of women. "I have often thought," he said, "that it is one of the most parlous customs in the world that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence, while I am confident that, had they the advantage of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves." In the meantime Defoe has apparently seen Mary Astell's proposal, and he politely ridicules her idea of a "nunnery." "Women are extravagantly desirous of going to heaven," he says, "and will punish their pretty bodies to get thither; but nothing else will do it, and even in that case it falls out sometimes that nature will prevail." He is in favour of public schools more like those in the country for youths. Women's faculties are equal to men's, he insists; the only difference is in education. But he hints that he will hear of no encroachment on "man's sphere," and so condemns in advance any political ambition. How little response there was to these appeals, and how the education of English women remained at an almost medieval level until little more than a generation ago, is sufficiently known. Thus the fire of the Renaissance burnt itself out in Italy and Spain within two or three centuries, and its inspiration led to little direct result in France, and still less in England. The history of French culture contains a number of names of brilliant women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the records of English literature are relieved by few feminine names until we reach the age of Queen Victoria. But the educative movement started by the Renaissance had great importance. It had provided a brilliant disproof of the prevailing belief that woman was of a lower order of intelligence than man. The position of men like Cornelius Agrippa and Defoe was one of unanswerable common sense. Inequality of culture between the sexes there assuredly was; but to ascribe this to native inequality of resource, instead of to the glaring inequality of education, was sheer folly. Grant woman the opportunity of attaining culture, and then one may sensibly begin to speculate on her capacity. And from every part of Christendom in which the opportunity was granted there came a report of brilliant and scholarly women. The extension of female education in our day has completed that first breach in the medieval superstition of woman's inferiority.