do you think the greatest woman dead or alive?' Napoleon
replied, `Her, Madame, _WHO HAS BORNE MOST SONS_.' Nettled by
this sarcastic reply, she returned to the charge, observing, `It
is said you are not friendly to the sex.' Napoleon was her match
again; `Madame,' he exclaimed, `I am passionately fond of my
wife;' and off he walked. Assuredly it would not mend matters in
this world (or the next) if all men were Napoleons and all women
de Staels.

If we consider the question in other points of view, have
there been, proportionally, fewer celebrated women than
illustrious men? fewer great queens than truly great kings?
Compare, on all sides, the means and the circumstances; count the
reigns, and decide.

The fact is that this question has been argued only by tyrannical
or very silly men, who found it difficult to get rid of the
absurd prejudices which retain the finest half of human nature in
slavery, and condemn it to obscurity under the pretext that it is
essentially corrupted. Towards the end of the 15th century a
certain demented writer attempted to prove that women do not even
deserve the title of reasonable creatures, which in the original
sounds oddly enough, namely, _probare nititur mulieres non
homines esse_. Another, a very learned Jesuit, endeavoured to
demonstrate that women have no souls! Some say that women
surpass us in wickedness; others, that they are both worse and
better than men.

That morbid wretch, Alexander Pope, said, `Every woman is at
heart a rake;' and a recent writer in the _Times_ puts more venom