It is quite superfluous to cast a mantle of charity, or any mantle whatever, over the crimes of the Renaissance, but I have tried in a small way to recall another side of its abounding life, which had its roots largely in the character of its forceful and intelligent women. The age that gave us a Bianca Capello gave us also a Vittoria Colonna. The one has long since been consigned to the fitful oblivion of infamy; the other holds her imperishable place among the stars, still lighting the sorrowful and world-weary with her messages of love and hope. The centuries of beauty and sin when men like to say that woman lost her birthright of virtue--a birthright which they never ceased to invade from their own stronghold of power--saw her transfigured by the imagination of Michelangelo into the immortal sibyls who sit side by side with the prophets in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, pure and passionless, with the brooding eyes that long ago fathomed all the secrets of a suffering world, read in the mystic leaves the records of nations still unborn, and saw from afar the light of the ages--unchanging types of the wisdom and divination that lie in the feminine soul. It saw, too, the Virgins of Fra Angelico, unfading symbols of purity as of angelic sweetness; and the Madonnas of Raphael, looking wistfully out of their repose with a ray of celestial love in their eyes and a smile of eternal beauty on their lips. VIII It is no part of the plan here to trace the causes of the decadence in which men lost their liberty of thought and women their position. Greed of money, greed of power, love of pleasure, the growth of luxury, and the low ideals that surely follow in their train, brought their logical results. The flower of estheticism that expands in the rich splendors of its ripe perfection verges already toward its dissolution. Then the Roman Catholic reaction, which forbade men to think, sent women back to prayers and seclusion, as a business instead of a resource; it was becoming, and quite safe. But the Italian princesses had set a fashion of knowledge, and of putting society on an intellectual plane, with what trimming of beauty and adornment of manners they could add. The irrepressible and many-gifted Marguerite of Navarre took it up with various changes and originalities of her own. The clever Frenchwomen saw their opportunity, and when the courts were sunk in vice and inanities, they drew out of the past its secret of social power, and created the literary salon, which was one of the glories of the golden age of France. The wave of knowledge which had raised the Italian women so high, and then so strangely receded, culminated again in the intellectual brilliancy and unparalleled influence of the Frenchwomen of the eighteenth century. The rise and fall of this movement and its central figures I have treated quite fully elsewhere. Again the wave receded, with the coming of the republic, to revive under other forms in our own country and our own