[64] The famous Hellenist, Roger Ascham, tells of his astonishment on finding Lady Jane Grey, when she was only fourteen years of age, reading Plato's Phaedo in Greek, when all the other members of the family were amusing themselves in the park. On his inquiry why she did not join the others in their pastime, she smilingly replied: "I wit all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure I find in Plato. Alas, good folk, they never knew what true pleasure meant." [65] To the poet Ronsard, she was a woman beyond compare, as is evinced by the following lines of a pastoral ode addressed to her: "La Royne Marguerite, La plus belle fleur d'elite Qu'onques la terre enfanta." [66] Cf. Oeuvres de Lovize Labe, nouvelle edition emprimee en caracteres dits de civilite, Paris, 1871. [67] The French poet, Jean Dorat, who was then professor of Latin in the College de France, expresses this fact in the following strophe: "Nempe uxor, ancillae, clientes, liberi, Non segnis examen domus, Quo Plautus ore, quo Terentius, solent Quotidiane loqui." [68] A prominent writer of the time, Jean Bouchet, expressed the prevailing opinion regarding the education of the women of the masses in the following quaint sentence: "Je suis bien d'opinion que les femmes de bas estat, et qui sont contrainctes vaquer aux choses familieres et domestiques, ne doivent vaquer aux lettres, parce que c'est chose repugnante a rusticite; mais, les roynes, princesses et aultres dames qui ne se doib vent pour reverence de leur estat, appliquer a mesnage." Cf. Rousellot's _Histoire de l'Education des Femmes en France_, Tom. I, p. 109, Paris, 1883. His ideal of a woman of the peasant type was apparently Joan of Arc, who, according to her own declaration, did not know a from b--"_elle declarait ne savoir ni a ni b_." [69] Claviere, op. cit., p. 415. [70] The noted English divine, Thomas Fuller, chaplain to Charles II, recognized the irreparable loss to women occasioned by the destruction of the nunneries by the Reformers. "There were," he tells us in his quaint language, "good she schools wherein the girls and maids of the neyghborhood were taught to read and work.... Yea, give me leave to say, if such feminine foundations had still continued, ... haply the weaker sex, besides the avoiding modern inconveniences, might be heyghtened to a higher perfection than hitherto hath been attained." _Church History_, Vol. III, p. 336, 1845. [71] M. Thureau Dangin, the perpetual secretary of the French Academy, wrote, "La tradition ne veut pas d'academiciennes." [72] Carlyle, in a lecture on Dante, and the _Divina Commedia_, declares that "Italy has produced a greater number of great men than any other nation, men distinguished in art, thinking, conduct, and everywhere in the departments of intellect." He could with equal truth have said that Italy has produced more great women than any other nation.