omantic, you added, are synonymous terms to this incredulous, this
matter-of-fact world, that, like the unbelieving Thomas, trusts in,
believes in nothing that it does not touch and handle. Your partiality for
days of chivalry blinds you a little. The men were splendid--women shone
with their reflected splendour--you see them through an illuminated haze,
and, as you were not behind the curtain, imagine their minds as cultivated
as their beauty was believed to be great. The mantle of chivalry hid all
the wrongs, but the particular ones from which they rescued them. If the
men are worse, our women are far better--more like those noble Roman
ladies, intellectual and high-minded, whom you have ever esteemed the
worthiest of history. Then women were valued. Valerius Maximus gives the
reason why women had the upper-hand. After the mother of Coriolanus and
other Roman women had preserved their country, how could the senate reward
them?--"Sanxit uti foeminis semita viri cederent--permisit quoque his
purpurea veste et aureis uti segmentis." It was sanctioned by the senate,
you perceive, that men should yield the wall to the sex, in honour, and
that they should be allowed the distinction of purple vests and golden
borders--privileges the female world still enjoy. Yet in times you love to
applaud, the paltry interference of men would have curtailed one of these
privileges. For a mandate was issued by the papal legate in Germany in the
14th century, decreeing, that "the apparel of women, which ought to be
consistent with modesty, but now, through their foolishness, is
degenerated into wantonness and extravagance, more particularly the
immoderate length of their petticoats, with which they sweep the ground,
be restrained to a moderate fashion, agreeably to the decency of the sex,
under pain of the sentence of excommunication." "Velamina etiam mulierum,
quae ad verecundiam designandam eis sunt concessa, sed nunc, per
insipientiam earum, in lasciviam et luxuriam excreverunt, it immoderata
longitudo superpelliccorum quibus pulverem trahunt, ad moderatum usum,
sicut decet verecundiam sexus, per excommunicationis sententiam
cohibeantur."

Excommunication, indeed! Not even the church could have carried on that
war long. Every word of this marks the degradation to which those monkish
times would have made the sex submit, "velamina _concessa_ insipientiam
earum!" and pretty well for men of the cloth of that day's make, to speak
of women's "l