A learned French traveler who visited Laura in Bologna describes her as having a face that was sweet, serious and modest. Her eyes were dark and sparkling, and she was blessed with a powerful memory, a solid judgment, and a ready imagination. "She conversed fluently with me in Latin for an hour with grace and precision. She is very proficient in metaphysics; but she prefers modern physics, particularly that of Newton." How many of our college women of to-day could readily carry on a conversation in Latin, if this were the sole medium of communication, or discuss the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle in the tongue of Cicero, or give public lectures on the physico-mathematical discoveries of Descartes and Newton in what was the universal language of the learned world, even less than a century ago? It must not, however, be inferred from the foregoing statements regarding the great intellectual capacity of Laura Bassi or the enthusiastic demonstrations that were so frequently made in her honor that she was unique in this respect among her countrywomen. Special attention has been called to her as a type of the large number of her sex who, by their learning and culture, graced the courts and honored the universities of her country for full ten centuries. Scarcely had death removed Laura Bassi from a career in which for twenty-eight years she had won the plaudits of the whole of Europe, when the University of Bologna welcomed to its learned halls two other women who, in their respective lines of research, were fully as eminent as their departed countrywoman. These were Maria dalle Donne, for whom Napoleon established a chair of obstetrics, and Clotilda Tambroni, the famous professor of Greek, of whom a noted Hellenist declared, "Only three persons in Europe are able to write Greek as well as she does, and not more than fifteen are able to understand her." Burckhardt, in his thoughtful work on the culture of the Italian Renaissance, has a paragraph which expresses, in a few words, what was always the attitude of the Italian father toward the education of his daughter. "The education of the woman of the upper class was absolutely the same as that of the man. The Italian of the Renaissance did not for a moment hesitate to give his son and daughter the same literary and philosophical training. He considered the knowledge of the works of antiquity life's greatest good, and he could not, therefore, deny to woman participation in such knowledge. Hence the perfection attained by the daughters of noble families in writing and speaking Latin."[156]