ife of the people, which had resulted
from the revival of learning in the sixteenth century, languished and
almost died of inanition. Even among those men--the courtiers--who
amused themselves chiefly by the foibles of the other sex, there was
a morbid reaction against their associates in frivolity. It was no
longer customary to praise women for their wit and repartee and
to look upon them as brilliant, or to regard their coarse jests as
delicate humor; instead of this, these men affected toward them great
contempt, and scoffed at all other men who manifested respect for
the sex. Whether among the nobility or among the Puritans, woman was
wounded in the house of her friends.

Amid the premonitory rumblings of civil strife and the actual horrors
of war, when the nation was rent asunder, the matters of belief and of
conduct were the burning themes for thought and discussion; it was not
possible to maintain interest in intellectual concerns, even if there
had not been a reaction from the highly wrought state of mind of the
preceding era. That behind the Puritans' apparent hatred of beauty and
of the grace of intellect and of life there was no real abandonment of
the true principles which underlie all permanent beauty and grace is
sufficiently shown by the production of that poet who sounded deepest
the reaches of philosophy and scaled highest the ascents of poetic
thought--the great Milton. He it was who caught the deep significance
of the movements of the age, and brought them into harmony with the
parable of human history--a feat so mighty that it called forth the
highest flights of poetic fancy and sought the embodiment of the best
graces of language. It is not without interest to note the absence of
woman in the lofty theme of Milton, saving only as she appears in the
Puritanic conception of the temptress.

Another of the Puritans, who in his way was as great as Milton,
Bunyan, the Bedford tinker, caught and set forth in magnificent
allegory the meaning of the Puritan movement for the individual;
but there is an absence of woman in the story of the pilgrimage of
Christian to the Celestial City, excepting as she appears in the
character of the temptress, as at Vanity Fair. The Christian Graces,
who are represented as women, are not types of the sex of the day, but
are used to point the contrast the more sharply between woman in ideal
and woman as the product of the times of the Puritans. It remained,
however, for the