In the literary circles of a later generation we hear of noble ladies of serious tastes meeting to converse about the poets. Juvenal and Martial ridiculed them as Molière did the Précieuses centuries afterward. “I hate a woman who never violates the rules of grammar, and quotes verses I never knew,” says Juvenal. “A husband should have the privilege of committing a solecism.” He objects to being bored at supper with impertinent questions about Homer and Vergil, or misplaced sympathy with the unhappy Dido, who, no doubt, ought to have taken her desertion philosophically instead of making it so unpleasant for her hero lover. He even suggests that women blessed with literary tastes should put on the tunics of the bolder sex and do various mannish things which are sometimes recommended by the satirists of to-day. It is with a sigh of regret that he recalls the “good old days of poverty and morals,” when it was written on a woman’s tombstone that she “spun wool and looked after her house.” “A good wife is rarer than a white crow,” is his amiable conclusion. All this goes to prove that in the first century women passed through the same ordeal of criticism as they have in the nineteenth. The satirists of to-day are no kinder to the Dante and Browning clubs, and mourn equally over the “good old days” when they were in no danger of a rival or a critic at the breakfast-table. Doubtless that age had its little pretensions and affectations, as every other great age has had--not excepting our own. There were women who talked platitudes about things of which they knew nothing, and men who did the same thing or worse on other lines laughed at them just as men do now at similar follies, though often without the talent of a Juvenal or a Martial, and, it is fair to say, without their incredible coarseness. The coming of women into literature has made the latter practically impossible. But even Martial had his better moments. He speaks of a young girl who has the eloquence of Plato, the austerity of the philosophers, and writes verses worthy of a chaste Sappho. One might imagine that his enthusiasm had run away with his prejudices, if Martial could be supposed to have had enthusiasms, as he warmly congratulates the friend who is to marry this prodigy. Possibly he preferred her as the wife of some one else, as he stipulates for himself, on another occasion, a wife who is “not too learned.”