[81] A writer of the seventeenth century gives the following as the popular programme of female study: "To learn alle pointes of good housewifery, spinning of linen, the ordering of dairies, to see to the salting of meate, brewing, bakery, and to understand the common prices of all houshold provisions. To keepe account of all things, to know the condition of the poultry--for it misbecomes no woman to be a hen-wife. To know how to order your clothes and with frugality to mend them and to buy but what is necessary with ready money. To love to keep at home." How like the German four K's and the words on the sarcophagus of a Roman matron--_lanifica_, _frugi_, _domiseda_--a diligent plyer of the distaff, thrifty and a stay-at-home. [82] _The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_, Vol. II, p. 5, Bohn Edition, 1887. [83] Letter XLIX, London, Sept. 5, O. S., 1748. Walpole, writing in 1773, makes the following curious declaration: "I made a discovery--Lady Nuneham is a poetess, and writes with great ease and sense some poetry, but is as afraid of the character, as if it was a sin to make verses." And Lord Granville tells us of an eminent statesman and man of letters who, in the early part of the last century, was so troubled on discovering in his daughter a talent for poetry that he "appealed to her affection for him, and made a request to her never to write verses again. He was not afraid of her becoming a good poetess, but he was afraid of the disadvantages which were likely to be suffered by her, if she were supposed to be a lady of literary attainments." [84] It was Swift who had such a low opinion of woman's intellect that in writing to one of his fair correspondents he told her that she could "never arrive in point of learning to the perfection of a schoolboy." Lady Pennington, strange to say, seems to have shared his views, for in a manual of advice to young ladies, she declares: "A sensible woman will soon be convinced that all the learning the utmost application can make her master of will be in many points inferior to that of the schoolboy." "At the time the Tatler first appeared in the female world any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured," and it was then considered "more important for a woman to dance a minuet well than to know a foreign language." [85] The wife of President John Adams, descended from the most illustrious colonial families, writing in 1817, regarding the educational opportunities of the girls of her time and rank, expressed herself as follows: