We have often heard men who wish, as almost all men of sense wish, that
women should be highly educated, speak with rapture of the English
ladies of the sixteenth century, and lament that they can find no modern
damsel resembling those fair pupils of Ascham and Aylmer who compared,
over their embroidery, the styles of Isocrates and Lysias, and who,
while the horns were sounding and the dogs in full cry, sat in the
lonely oriel, with eyes riveted to that immortal page which tells how
meekly and bravely the first great martyr of intellectual liberty took
the cup from his weeping gaoler. But surely these complaints have very
little foundation. We would by no means disparage the ladies of the
sixteenth century or their pursuits. But we conceive that those who
extol them at the expense of the women of our time forget one very
obvious and very important circumstance. In the time of Henry the Eighth
and Edward the Sixth, a person who did not read Greek and Latin could
read nothing, or next to nothing. The Italian was the only modern
language which possessed anything that could be called a literature. All
the valuable books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe
would hardly have filled a single shelf. England did not yet possess
Shakespeare's plays and the _Faery Queene_, nor France Montaigne's
_Essays_, nor Spain _Don Quixote_. In looking round a well-furnished
library, how many English or French books can we find which were extant
when Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth received their education?
Chaucer, Gower, Froissart, Comines, Rabelais, nearly complete the list.
It was therefore absolutely necessary that a woman should be uneducated
or classically educated.--LORD MACAULAY. _Lord Bacon._