oach you." Abraham replies to that:
"To sin is human, to persist in sin is hellish. He who stumbles is not
to be blamed, only he who neglects to rise as quickly as possible."

In the play Dukitius, the Roman general so named, to commit an act of
criminal wantonness, enters at night time the prison of three Christian
maidens who had been thrown into confinement by order of Diocletian, the
persecutor of Christians. But the would-be ravisher is confounded by the
Holy Virgin, the protectress of innocence, and takes the pots and
kettles and pans for the maidens. The virgins look through the chinks of
the wall, and see the fool out of his mind holding the pots caressingly
on his lap, and kissing tenderly the pans and kettles. Irene remarks:
"His face and his hands and his clothes are soiled and blackened all
over by his imaginary sweethearts." "Just as it should be," replies
Chiona, "it is the color of Satan who possesses him."

Such was the work of the virtuous Christian singer in a strange foreign
garment, the only one possible for her to write in, for a popular
written German language did not yet exist. But her work was not lost, or
as she said herself in her preface: "If anybody shall find pleasure in
this my devotion (_devotio_), I shall be glad; but if it should please
no one, on account of my humble station or the rusticity of a faulty
diction, I myself at least rejoice over what I have done." Later on,
copies of her works were spread beyond her cloister. One copy was dug up
some five hundred years later from the dust of the cloister library of
Saint Emmeran at Regensburg by Conrad Celtes of Humanist fame, and
edited by him in 1,501. Roswitha was greeted by the world of the
Renaissance as the "German Muse." Celtes's edition is adorned by the
immortal Albrecht Durer with a woodcut representing Roswitha in a
kneeling posture, presenting her works to Emperor Otto the Great in the
presence of Archbishop Wilhelm of Mainz.

While dealing with the womanhood of the Ottoman era, it is incumbent
upon us to mention the history of a true German type of a royal woman,
who has been immortalized by Scheffel in the romance _Ekkehard_, already
mentioned: Hadwig, Duchess of Suabia, niece of Otto I., sister of
Gerberga, the abbess of Germersheim, the famous connoisseur of the
classical authors, and the teacher of Roswitha. Early widowed by
Burkhard of Suabia, the young, strong-minded princess of Saxon imperial
blood with a firm hand co