lained learnedly why
they were more tempted than men to heresy and witchcraft, and more
subject (those especially who had beautiful hair) to the attacks of
demons; and, in a word, regarded them as a necessary evil, to be
tolerated, despised, repressed, and if possible shut up in nunneries.

Of this literature of celibate unreason, those who have no time to read
for themselves the pages of Sprenger, Meier, or Delrio the Jesuit, may
find notices enough in Michelet, and in both Mr. Lecky's excellent works.
They may find enough of it, and to spare also, in Burton's 'Anatomy of
Melancholy.' He, like Knox, and many another scholar of the 16th and of
the first half of the 17th century, was unable to free his brain
altogether from the _idola specus_ which haunted the cell of the
bookworm. The poor student, knowing nothing of women, save from books or
from contact with the most debased, repeated, with the pruriency of a
boy, the falsehoods about women which, armed with the authority of
learned doctors, had grown reverend and incontestable with age; and even
after the Reformation more than one witch-mania proved that the corrupt
tree had vitality enough left to bring forth evil fruit.

But the axe had been laid to the root thereof. The later witch
prosecutions were not to be compared for extent and atrocity to the
mediaeval ones; and first, as it would seem, in France, and gradually in
other European countries, the old contempt of women was being replaced by
admiration and trust. Such examples as that of Marguerite d'Angouleme
did much, especially in the South of France, where science, as well as
the Bible, was opening men's eyes more and more to nature and to fact.
Good little Rondelet, or any of his pupils, would have as soon thought of
burning a woman for a witch as they would have of immuring her in a
nunnery.

In Scotland, John Knox's book came, happily for the nation, too late. The
woes of Mary Stuart called out for her a feeling of chivalry which has
done much, even to the present day, to elevate the Scotch character.
Meanwhile, the same influences which raised the position of women among
the Reformed in France raised it likewise in Scotland; and there is no
country on earth in which wives and mothers have been more honoured, and
more justly honoured, for two centuries and more. In England, the
passionate loyalty with which Elizabeth was regarded, at least during the
latter part of her reign, scattered to the winds