same pattern; we have the example of the Marchioness de
Brinvilliers as to what amount of spiritual deviltry can exist with the
face and manner of an angel direct from heaven; and perhaps Cordelia was
a tall dark-haired girl, with a pair of brown eyes, and a long nose
sloping downwards.

Look at modern Jewesses, with their flashing Oriental orbs, their
night-black tresses, and the dusky shadows of their olive-colored
complexions; as catalogued properties according to the ideal, they would
be placed in the list of the natural criminals and lawbreakers, while in
reality they are about as meek and docile a set of women as are to be
found within the four seas. Pit a fiery little Welsh woman or a petulant
Parisienne against the most regal and Junonic amongst them, and let them
try conclusions in courage, in energy, or in audacity; the Israelitish
Juno will go down before either of the small Philistines, and the
fallacy of weight and color in the generation of power will be shown
without the possibility of denial. Even in those old days of long ago,
when human characteristics were embodied and deified, we do not find
that the white-armed, large-limbed Here, though queen by right of
marriage, lorded it over her sister goddesses by any superior energy or
force of nature. On the contrary, she was rather a heavy-going person,
and, unless moved to anger by her husband's numerous infidelities, took
her Olympian life placidly enough, and once or twice got cheated in a
way that did no great credit to her sagacity. A little Frenchwoman would
have sailed around her easily; and as it was, shrewish though she was in
her speech when provoked, her husband not only deceived but chastised
her, and reduced her to penitence and obedience as no little woman would
have suffered herself to be reduced.

There is one celebrated race of women who were probably the
powerfully-built, large-limbed creatures they are assumed to have been,
and as brave and energetic as they were strong and big--the Norse women
of the sagas, who, for good or evil, seem to have been a very
influential element in the old Northern life. Prophetesses, physicians,
dreamers of dreams and the accredited interpreters as well, endowed with
magic powers, admitted to a share in the councils of men, brave in war,
active in peace, these fair-haired Scandinavian women were the fit
comrades of their men, the fit wives and mothers of the Berserkers and
the Vikings. They had no tame or e