It is pleasant to record that the most ardent champions of feminine ability were men of more than ordinary caliber. As men rarely exaggerate the talents of women, though they sometimes make goddesses of them, we may safely conclude that their pictures were not overdrawn on that side. Truth, however, compels me to say that some of the eulogists were accomplished courtiers with special appreciation of queens and princesses who might make or mar their fortunes; also that this complaisance was by no means universal. Whether the satirists, novelists, and minor poets found the wicked more effective, from a dramatic point of view, than the good, as many of their successors do to-day, or the sensual age was more interested in pretty sinners than in saints, it is certain that these writers paid scant honor to women, and delighted to put them in the worst light, though satire was in the main directed against the ignorant and the frivolous, not against the intelligent or the strong. Even Montaigne refused to look upon a woman otherwise than as a useful but inferior animal, though he inconsistently chose one of these “inferior animals” as his confidante and literary executor, because she was the “only person he knew in whose literary judgment he could confide.” The scholarly Erasmus said she was “a foolish, silly creature, no doubt, but amusing and agreeable.” He was happy in the belief that “the great end of her existence is to please men”; but he pays his own sex a poorer compliment than we should like to when he adds that “she could not do this without folly.”