atriarchal
fashion, with Mrs. Knox and Mrs. Bowes and Mrs. Locke, James his
servant, Patrick his pupil, and a due following of children and maids.
He might be alone at work all morning in his study, for he wrote much
during these two years; but at night, you may be sure there was a circle
of admiring women, eager to hear the new paragraph, and not sparing of
applause. And what work, among others, was he elaborating at this time,
but the notorious "First Blast"? So that he may have rolled out in his
big pulpit voice, how women were weak, frail, impatient, feeble,
foolish, inconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of counsel,
and how men were above them, even as God is above the angels, in the
ears of his own wife, and the two dearest friends on earth. But he had
lost the sense of incongruity, and continued to despise in theory the
sex he honoured so much in practice, of whom he chose his most intimate
associates, and whose courage he was compelled to wonder at, when his
own heart was faint.

We may say that such a man was not worthy of his fortune; and so, as he
would not learn, he was taken away from that agreeable school, and his
fellowship of women was broken up, not to be reunited. Called into
Scotland to take at last that strange position in history which is his
best claim to commemoration, he was followed thither by his wife and his
mother-in-law. The wife soon died. The death of her daughter did not
altogether separate Mrs. Bowes from Knox, but she seems to have come and
gone between his house and England. In 1562, however, we find him
characterised as "a sole man by reason of the absence of his
mother-in-law, Mrs. Bowes," and a passport is got for her, her man, a
maid, and "three horses, whereof two shall return," as well as liberty
to take all her own money with her into Scotland. This looks like a
definite arrangement; but whether she died at Edinburgh, or went back to
England yet again, I cannot find. With that great family of hers, unless
in leaving her husband she had quarrelled with them all, there must have
been frequent occasion for her presence, one would think. Knox at least
survived her; and we possess his epigraph to their long intimacy, given
to the world by him in an appendix to his latest publication. I have
said in a former paper that Knox was not shy of personal revelations in
his published works. And the trick seems to have grown on him. To this
last tract, a controversial onslaught on