me of
Sinbad--_there_ is a true picture of man's cowardice; what loathsome holes
did he not creep into to make his escape when the wife of his bosom was
sick, and he understood the law that he was to be buried with her. It is
all very well, in the sick chamber, for the husband to say to his
departing partner for life--"Wait, my dearest--I will go with you." She is
sure, as La Fontaine says in his satire, reversing the case, "to take the
journey alone." This is all talk on the man's side--but see what the
master of the slave woman has actually imposed upon her as a law. The
Hindoo widow ascends the funeral pile, and is burnt rejoicing. What male
creature ever thought of enduring this for his wife?--this wrong, for it
is a grievous wrong thus to tempt her superior fortitude. It was not
without reason that, in the heathen mythology, (and it shows the great
advancement of civilization when and wherever it was conceived,) were
deified all great and noble qualities in the image of the sex. What are
Juno, Minerva, and Venus, but acknowledgments of the strength, wisdom,
fortitude, beauty, and love, of woman, while their male deities have but
borrowed attributes and ambiguous characters? It is a deference--perhaps
unintentionally, unconsciously--paid to the sex, that in every language
the soul itself, and all its noblest virtues, and the personification of
all virtue, are feminine.

I supposed woman the legislatrix--what reason have we to say she would
enact a wrong? The story of the mother of Papirius is not against her; for
in that case there was only a choice of evils. It is from Aulus Gellius,
as having been told and written by M. Cato in the oration which he made to
the soldiers against Galba. The mother of young Papirius, who had
accompanied his father into the senate-house, as was usual formerly for
sons to do who had taken the _toga praetexta_, enquired of her son what
the senate had been doing; the youth replied, that he had been enjoined
silence. This answer made her the more importunate and he adopted this
humorous fallacy--that it had been discussed in the senate which would be
most beneficial to the state, for one man to have two wives, or for one
woman to have two husbands? Hearing this, she left the house in no small
trepidation, and went to tell other matrons what she had heard. The next
day a troop of matrons went to the senate-house, and implored, with tears
in their eyes, that one woman might be suffered to hav