taught that true virgin delicacy was almost as incompatible with
learning as with vice,--and Dr. Channing complained, in his "Essay on
Exclusion and Denunciation," of "women forgetting the tenderness of
their sex" and arguing on theology.

Now this impression of feminine inferiority may be right or wrong, but
it obviously does a good deal towards explaining the facts it takes for
granted. If contempt does not originally cause failure, it perpetuates
it. Systematically discourage any individual or class, from birth to
death, and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to acquiesce in their
degradation, if not to claim it as a crown of glory. If the Abbé Choisi
praised the Duchesse de Fontanges for being "beautiful as an angel and
silly as a goose," it was natural that all the young ladies of the court
should resolve to make up in folly what they wanted in charms. All
generations of women having been bred under the shadow of intellectual
contempt, they have of course done much to justify it. They have often
used only for frivolous purposes even the poor opportunities allowed
them. They have employed the alphabet, as Molière said, chiefly in
spelling the verb _Amo_. Their use of science has been like that of
Mlle. de Launay, who computed the decline in her lover's affection by
his abbreviation of their evening walk in the public square, preferring
to cross it rather than take the circuit,--"From which I inferred," she
says, "that his passion had diminished in the ratio between the diagonal
of a rectangular parallelogram and the sum of two adjacent sides."
And their conception, even of Art, has been too often on the scale
of Properzia de Rossi, who carved sixty-five heads on a walnut, the
smallest of all recorded symbols of woman's sphere.

All this might perhaps be overcome, if the social prejudice which
discourages woman would only reward proportionately those who surmount