In this blending of literature and fashion women had a prominent place, though not as writers. No woman of the educated class could write for money, and talent of that sort, even if she had it, would have brought her little consideration. Whatever she may have done in that direction was like foam on the crest of a wave. It vanished with the moment. At a later period there were a few who wrote poetry of which a trace is left. Balbilla, who was taken to Egypt in the train of Hadrian and the good Empress Sabina, went out to hear the song with which Memnon greeted his mother Aurora at dawn, and scratched some verses on the statue in honor of her visit. Possibly they were only the flattering trifles of a clever courtier, but they were graven on stone and outlasted many better things. Of wider fame was Sulpicia, the wife of a noted man in the reign of Domitian, who wrote a poem on “Conjugal Love,” also a satire on an edict banishing the philosophers, fragments of which still exist. She had the old Roman spirit, but was less conciliatory than the eloquent Hortensia of an earlier day, who was tired of the brutalities of war. She mourned the degeneracy of the age, calling for “reverses that will awaken patriotism, yes, reverses to make Rome strong again, to rouse her from the soft and enervating languor of a fatal peace.” The able but wicked Agrippina, of tragical memory, wrote the story of her life which gave to Tacitus many facts and points for his “Annals.” Doubtless there were other things that went the way of the passing epigrams and verses of Augustus and his elegant courtiers. Twenty centuries hence who will ever hear of the thousands, yes, millions of more or less clever essays and poems written by men and women to-day and multiplied indefinitely by a facile press? What will the future antiquarian who searches the pages of a nineteenth-century anthology know of us, save that every man and woman wrote, but nothing lived, except perhaps a volume or two from the work of a few poets, essayists, and historians, who can be counted on one’s fingers? Oh, yes; there are the novelists whose value is measured by figures and dollars, who multiply as the locusts do. Fine as we may think them to-day, how many of their books will survive the sifting of time? They may be piled in old libraries, but who will take the trouble to dive into a mass that literally has no bottom? Will the world forget that women did anything worth preserving? Yet our women are educated; some of them are scholars, most of them are intelligent; many write well, and a few surpassingly well.