For instance, the exclusion of woman from all these spheres was in ancient
Greece almost complete; yet the leading Greek poets, as Homer and the
tragedians, are exceedingly chaste in tone, and in this respect beyond most
of the great poets of modern nations. Again, no European nation has quite
so far sequestered and subordinated women as has Spain; and yet the whole
tone of Spanish literature is conspicuously grave and decorous. This
plainly indicates that race has much to do with the matter, and that the
mere admission or exclusion of women is but one among several factors. In
short, it is easy to make out a case by a rhetorical use of the facts on
one side; but, if we look at all the facts, the matter presents greater
difficulties.

Again, it is to be noted that in several countries the first women who have
taken prominent part in literature have been as bad as the men; as, for
instance, Marguerite of Navarre and Mrs. Aphra Behn. This might indeed be
explained by supposing that they had to gain entrance into literature by
accepting the dissolute standards which they found prevailing. But it would
probably be more correct to say that these standards themselves were
variable, and that their variation affected, at certain periods, women as
well as men. Marguerite of Navarre wrote religious books as well as merry
stories; and we know from Lockhart's Life of Scott, that ladies of high
character in Edinburgh used to read Mrs. Behn's tales and plays aloud, at
one time, with delight,--although one of the same ladies found, in her old
age, that she could not read them to herself without blushing. Shakespeare
puts coarse repartees into the mouths of women of stainless virtue. George
Sand is not considered an unexceptionable writer; but she tells us in her
autobiography that she found among her grandmother's papers poems and
satires so indecent that she could not read them through, and yet they bore
the names of _abbés_ and gentlemen whom she remembered in her childhood as