Coleridge. The serious motive, the question of Woman, her wrongs,
her rights, her education, her capabilities, was not "in the air" in
1847. To be sure it had often been "in the air." The Alexandrian
Platonists, the Renaissance, even the age of Anne, had their
emancipated and learned ladies. Early Greece had Sappho, Corinna,
and Erinna, the first the chief of lyric poets, even in her
fragments, the two others applauded by all Hellas. The French
Revolution had begotten Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her
Vindication of the Rights of Women, and in France George Sand was
prominent and emancipated enough while the poet wrote. But, the
question of love apart, George Sand was "very, very woman," shining
as a domestic character and fond of needlework. England was not
excited about the question which has since produced so many
disputants, inevitably shrill, and has not been greatly meddled with
by women of genius, George Eliot or Mrs Oliphant. The poem, in the
public indifference as to feminine education, came rather
prematurely. We have now ladies' colleges, not in haunts remote from
man, but by the sedged banks of Cam and Cherwell. There have been no
revolutionary results: no boys have spied these chaste nests, with
echoing romantic consequences. The beauty and splendour of the
Princess's university have not arisen in light and colour, and it is
only at St Andrews that girls wear the academic and becoming costume
of the scarlet gown. The real is far below the ideal, but the real
in 1847 seemed eminently remote, or even impossible.

The learned Princess herself was not on our level as to knowledge and
the past of womankind. She knew not of their masterly position in
the law of ancient Egypt. Gynaeocracy and matriarchy, the woman the
head of the savage or prehistoric group, were things hidden from her.
She "glanced at the Lycian custom," but not at the Pictish, a custom