ey will no longer rest contented with permission to read
books written for their fathers, brothers, lovers, or husbands; some
must be written especially on their account, consulting their
preferences and personal caprices; and they had good reason to command:
one of them sat on the throne.

They, too, began to read Greek, Latin, Italian and French; knowledge was
so much the fashion that it extended to women. Here Ascham bears
testimony in their favour; the Queen herself gives the example: "She
readeth now at Windsore more Greeke every day than some prebendarie of
this chirch doth read Latin in a wole weeke."[54] In this she has
innumerable imitators, so much so that Harrison sums up as follows his
judgment concerning English ladies: "To saie how many gentlewomen and
ladies there are, that beside sound knowledge of the Greeke and Latin
toongs are thereto no lesse skilfull in the Spanish, Italian and French
or in some one of them, it resteth not in me."[55]

It must not be believed, however, that so much Greek and Latin in any
way imperilled the grace and ease of their manners, or that when you met
them you would be welcomed with a quotation from Plato and dismissed
with a verse from Virgil. Far from it. It was the custom at that time
with English ladies to greet their friends and relations, and even
strangers, with kisses, and strange as it may appear to our modern
ideas, accustomed as we are to stare in amazement at such practices when
by any chance we observe them in southern countries, the custom was so
strikingly prevalent in England that travellers noticed it as one of
the strange sights of the land; grave Erasmus cynically calls it one of
its attractions. "This custom," says he, "will never be praised
enough."[56] The above-named Nicander Nucius, of Corcyra, who came to
England some fifty years later, notices the same habit as a great local
curiosity. According to him, the English "display great simplicity and
absence of jealousy in their usages towards females. For not only do
those who are of the same family and household kiss them ... with
salutations and embraces, but even those, too, who have never seen them.
And to themselves this appears by no means indecent."[57] The very Queen
herself, even in the middle of the most imposing ceremonies, could not
help indulging in familiarities contrary to our ideas of decorum, but
quite in accordance with the freedom of manners then prevalent. Sir
James Melville relates