From men, women, and manners, the transition to love was an easy one, and this fifteenth-century coterie discussed it in all its variations, as we discuss the last play, or the last novel, or the last word in sociology, or the misty era of universal peace. It was not a new thing to discourse upon the most interesting of human passions. Men had talked of it centuries before on the banks of the Ilissus; but when they passed from its lowest phases they lost themselves in metaphysical subtleties. It became an intellectual aspiration, a “passion of the reason,” without warmth or life. Diotima, a woman quoted by Socrates, called it “a mystic dream of the beautiful and good”; but if she was not a myth herself, she could not join the symposia of philosophers. Outside of the circle of Aspasia, no respectable woman was admitted to the conversations of men; indeed, these finely drawn dissertations on love had small reference to her. In the classic world women had no part in the marriage of souls. Love, when not purely a thing of the senses, was a worship of beauty, and the Greek ideal of beauty was a masculine one. They might die for a Helen, but it was not for love. These wise talkers sent the flute-players to amuse their wives and daughters in the inner court, while they considered high things, as well as many not suitable for delicate ears. The coarser Romans treated love as altogether a thing of the senses, with Ovid as a text. But in the golden age of the Renaissance, women no longer stayed in the inner court, to gossip and listen to flute-players, while their husbands talked on themes high or low. The worship of the Madonna, if it had done little else, had idealized the pure affection of an exalted womanhood. Chivalry following in its train had made the cult of woman a fashion by giving her more or less of the homage already paid to her divine representative, though this sentiment was less active in Italy than in Provence or among the more romantic races. It was a tribute of strength to helplessness, and had its roots in the finest traits of men; but it exalted moral qualities rather than intellectual ones, and was largely theoretical outside of a limited class. Now that men had begun to dip into classic lore, however, they found a valuable ally in women, and the old cult became a companionship. To be educated and a princess was to be doubly a power, to have opinions which it was worth while to consider.