a good wife who was grateful for being trampled upon, even when her innocent heart was breaking. It was a fine object-lesson for the proper education of girls, and this marvel of self-sacrifice was held up from one end of Europe to the other as a model of womanhood. Poets painted her over and over again, with race variations; moralists praised her; and men quoted her to their wives. Some instinct of justice prompted Boccaccio to reward her in the end for all this useless misery, which was simply a test of her servile quality, by putting her again, after a series of years, into the good graces of her inhuman husband; but it is needless to say that such rewards of virtue, if they could be considered rewards, are not in the way of a world in which these lessons are read. All this shows how far the heroines of the early poets, whether good or bad, differed from the strong, able, and accomplished women who were recognized as the glories of the Renaissance. It suggests also the lurid or colorless background against which the latter were outlined. The cynical bachelor in Molière’s comedy summed up the whole duty of woman according to the gospel of the middle ages--and, it might be added, of many other ages--when he said that his wife must know only how to “pray to God, love, sew, and spin.” The last three qualifications were necessary for his own comfort, and he had the penetration to divine that she might have ample need of the first on her own account. Then it gave him an agreeable sense of security to have a certain proprietorship in some one mildly affiliated with the next world. “In thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” says Hamlet to the fair Ophelia. A man might be the worst of sinners himself, but he liked a seasoning of piety in his wife, provided it was not too aggressive and left him free to be wicked if he chose. It was like having an altar in the home, and gave it a desirable flavor of saintliness.