ess
and lofty feeling, which lent grace to prejudice and chastened error into
virtue, were exchanged, in the days of Charles II., for undisguised
corruption and insatiable venality, for license without generosity,
persecution without faith, and luxury without refinement. Grammont's
animated _Memoires_ are a complete, and, from the happy unconsciousness of
the writer to the vices he portrays, a faithful picture of the court, to
which the description Polydore Virgil gives of a particular family, "nec
vir fortis nec foemina casta," was almost literally applicable.

Various as are the beauties of style with which this work
abounds--beauties which, to borrow the phrase of Cicero, rise as
naturally from the subject as a flower from its stem--we doubt whether it
contains a more felicitous illustration than that which we are about to
quote. The reader must bear in mind that the object of the writer is to
establish the proposition, that there is an average inferiority of women
to men in certain qualities, which, slight as it may appear, or
altogether as it may vanish, in particular instances, is, on the whole,
incontestable, and according to which the transactions of daily life are
distributed.

"All inconvenience is avoided by a slight inferiority of strength
and abilities in one of the sexes. This gradually develops a
particular turn of character, a new class of affections and
sentiments that humanize and embellish the species more than any
others. These lead at once, without art or hesitation, to a
division of duties, needed alike in all situations, and produce
that order without which there can be no social progression. In
the treatise of _The Hand_, by Sir Charles Bell, we learn that
the left hand and foot are naturally a little weaker than the
right; the effect of this is, to make us more prompt and
dexterous than we should otherwise be. If there were no
difference at all between the right and left limbs, the slight
degree of hesitation which hand to use or which foot to put
forward, would create an awkwardness that would operate more or
less every moment of our lives, and the provision to prevent it
seems analogous to the difference nature has made between the
strength of the sexes."

The domain of woman is the horizon where heaven and earth meet--a sort of
land debatable between the confines where positive institutions end and
intellectual supremacy