faults of spelling such as a charity girl would now be ashamed to
commit. [170]

The explanation may easily be found. Extravagant licentiousness,
the natural effect of extravagant austerity, was now the mode;
and licentiousness had produced its ordinary effect, the moral and
intellectual degradation of women. To their personal beauty, it was the
fashion to pay rude and impudent homage. But the admiration and desire
which they inspired were seldom mingled with respect, with affection,
or with any chivalrous sentiment. The qualities which fit them to
be companions, advisers, confidential friends, rather repelled than
attracted the libertines of Whitehall. In that court a maid of honour,
who dressed in such a manner as to do full justice to a white bosom,
who ogled significantly, who danced voluptuously, who excelled in pert
repartee, who was not ashamed to romp with Lords of the Bedchamber and
Captains of the Guards, to sing sly verses with sly expression, or to
put on a page's dress for a frolic, was more likely to be followed and
admired, more likely to be honoured with royal attentions, more likely
to win a rich and noble husband than Jane Grey or Lucy Hutchinson would
have been. In such circumstances the standard of female attainments was
necessarily low; and it was more dangerous to be above that standard
than to be beneath it. Extreme ignorance and frivolity were thought less
unbecoming in a lady than the slightest tincture of pedantry. Of the
too celebrated women whose faces we still admire on the walls of Hampton
Court, few indeed were in the habit of reading anything more valuable
than acrostics, lampoons, and translations of the Clelia and the Grand
Cyrus.

The literary acquirements, even of the accomplished gentlemen of that
generation, seem to have been somewhat less solid and profound than at
an earlier or a later period. Greek learning, at least, did not flourish
among us in the days of Charles the Second, as it had flourished before
the civil war, or as it again flourished long after the Revolution.
There were undoubtedly scholars to whom the whole Greek literature,
from Homer to Photius, was familiar: but such scholars were to be found
almost exclusively among the clergy resident at the Universities, and
even at the Universities were few, and were not fully appreciated. At
Cambridge it was not thought by any means necessary that a divine should
be able to read the Gospels in the original. [171] Nor was th