It may easily be imagined that the pale, slender, ascetic monk of thirty-four, with the light of genius in his eye, the fire of sublimated passion in his soul, and the vein of poetry running through his nature, had a strange power over these women who lived on moral heights quite above the heavy worldly atmosphere about them. This spiritual exaltation has swayed women of ardent imagination ever since the days of the apostles, and doubtless swayed them before. It was the secret of Savonarola’s influence. Under the inspiration of the persuasive Nicole, the earnest Arnauld, and the austere Pascal, the great ladies of France put off their silks and jewels with their mundane vanities, and knelt in the bare cells at Port-Royal, with the haircloth and the iron girdle pressing the delicate flesh as they prayed. Fénelon found his most ardent disciple in the mystic Mme. Guyon. The pure soul of Mme. Swetchine responded to the earnest words of Lacordaire as the Æolian harp vibrates to the lightest breath of wind. “I cannot attach to your name the glory of the Roman women whom St. Jerome has immortalized,” he says, “and yet you were of their race.... The light of your soul illumined the land that received you, and for forty years you were for us the sweetest echo of the gospel and the surest road to honor.” It is needless to recall the power of many spiritual men of our own race and day in leading the serious and gay alike into paths of a rational self-renunciation. Perhaps the little coterie in which St. Jerome found himself was more permanently severe in its self-discipline than most of the later ones have been. Doubtless there was a little blending of the church and the world, of literature and prayers, of gilded trappings with the nun’s robe and the monk’s cowl. But when these Roman women came into the devoted household on the Aventine, they usually renounced the world very literally, though it is not unlikely that they had a following of those who mingled a pale and decorous piety with their worldly pleasures, as did many of the priests whom St. Jerome attacks with such biting sarcasm.