The national system of education had not been developed in the eighteenth century, making the acquirement of an education somewhat dependent upon individual circumstances as affected by personal ambitions. There was nothing in the way of general education for women. But the dawn of better things intellectually was shown by the development of a group of women of literary comprehension and productivity, who formed a set apart and yet were in a real sense prophets in a wilderness, proclaiming the democracy of letters. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes very bitterly of the low esteem in which was held the intellectuality of the sex, and in speaking of the study of classics, says: "My sex is usually forbid studies of this nature, and folly reckoned so much our proper sphere we are sooner pardoned any excesses of that, than the least pretensions to reading or good sense.... Our minds are entirely neglected, and, by disuse of reflections, filled with nothing but the trifling objects our eyes are daily entertained with. This custom so long established and industriously upheld makes it even ridiculous to go out of the common road, and forces one to find as many excuses as if it was a thing altogether criminal not to play the fool in concert with other women of quality, whose birth and leisure only serve to render them the most useless and most worthless part of the creation. There is hardly a creature in the world more despicable or more liable to universal ridicule than a learned woman! These words imply, according to the received sense, a tattling, impertinent, vain, and conceited creature.... The Abbé Bellegarde gives a reason for women's talking over much: they know nothing, and every outward object strikes their imagination and produces a multitude of thoughts, which, if they knew more, they would know not worth thinking of. I am not now arguing for an equality of the two sexes. I do not doubt God and nature have thrown us into an inferior rank; we are a lower part of the creation, we owe obedience and submission to the superior sex, and any woman who suffers her folly and vanity to deny this rebels against the laws of the Creator, and indisputable order of nature; but there is a worse effect than this, which follows the careless education given to women of quality--it's being so easy for any man of sense, that finds it either his interest or his pleasure to corrupt them. The common method is to begin by attacking their religion: they bring a thousand fallacious arguments their excessive ignorance hinders them from refuting; and, I speak now from my own knowledge and conversation among them, there are more atheists among the fine ladies than among the lowest sort of rakes." This bitter plaint of a lady of quality, with its humiliating acknowledgment of the inferiority of her sex and the hopelessness of that inferiority, sounds very pathetic in the light of the present-day estimate of woman and her acknowledged