Of the noble ladies who presided over the literary courts, the few we have recalled were among the greatest, and, with one exception, it is generally conceded that their lives were without reproach. Others were victims of a power over which they had no control. It must be remembered that these women, however capable or high in place, were in the last resort subject to the will of men. Their new intelligence had made them helpers to be respected, and tempered a little the possible tyranny of their self-constituted masters, but men themselves, the nobler and wiser, saw the dangers in the abuse of their own power. “If women corrupt, they have first been corrupted by their age,” said Giuliano de’ Medici, the best and purest of his family, in one of the conversations at Urbino, which, thanks to its women, had not only the most intelligent but the most virtuous court in Italy. When a Borgia or some other pope equally devoid of moral sense, who sits at the head of Christendom and directs its conscience, orders at pleasure the marriage and divorce of his own daughter, or of any other woman who can serve his political or mercenary ends, giving her no choice and no recourse; when Imperias and Tullias preside over the salons of Rome because etiquette forbids a pure and high-minded woman to live in this lax society of prelates and cardinals, which she would be likely to find neither safe nor agreeable, there is little to be said about the connection between woman’s intelligence and moral decadence. Imperias and Tullias have lived in all ages, and they have flourished best where good women were the most ignorant and colorless. Some of them have had talent and esprit. They have sung, acted, danced, written sonnets, affected learning, patronized the arts, even put on the garb of virtue and piety; but they can be no more cited as representatives of the women of centuries ago than the same class to-day can be taken as a measure of our own moral standards, which is clearly impossible. Intelligence was never a guaranty of morals, as the mind can be sharpened for bad ends as well as good ones. It is even possible that the woman of education and strong mental fiber may be more easily led into the sins of ambition, but she is far less likely to drift into the follies of vanity, passion, and a weak will than the ignorant one who has no rational outlet for her energies and her untempered sensibilities. The faults, too, of a luminous age are seen in a glare of light that is wholly wanting in periods of darkness when vice shelters itself behind closed doors upon which it too often hangs the drapery of virtue.