er dreamed of. Still, literary
history preserves the names of some reformers before the Reformation, in
this matter. There was Signora Moderata Fonte, the Venetian, who left a
book to be published after her death, in 1592, "Dei Meriti delle Donne."
There was her townswoman, Lucrezia Marinella, who followed ten years
after, with her essay, "La Nobilita e la Eccelenza delle Donne, con
Difetti e Mancamenti degli Domini,"--a comprehensive theme, truly! Then
followed the all-accomplished Anna Maria Schurman, in 1645, with her
"Dissertatio de Ingenii Muliebris ad Doctrinam et meliores Literas
Aptitudine," with a few miscellaneous letters appended, in Greek and
Hebrew. At last came boldly Jacquette Guillaume, in 1665, and threw down
the gauntlet in her title-page, "Les Dames Illustres; ou par bonnes et
fortes Raisons il se prouve que le Sexe Feminin surpasse en toute Sorte
de Genre le Sexe Masculin"; and with her came Margaret Boufflet and a
host of others; and finally, in England, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose
famous book, formidable in its day, would seem rather conservative
now,--and in America, that pious and worthy dame, Mrs. H. Mather
Crocker, Cotton Mather's grandchild, who, in 1818, published the first
book on the "Rights of Woman" ever written on this side the Atlantic.

Meanwhile there have never been wanting men, and strong men, to echo
these appeals. From Cornelius Agrippa and his essay (1509) on the
excellence of woman and her preeminence over man, down to the first
youthful thesis of Agassiz, "Mens Feminae Viri Animo superior," there
has been a succession of voices crying in the wilderness. In England,
Anthony Gibson wrote a book, in 1599, called "A Woman's Woorth, defended
against all the Men in the World, proouing them to be more Perfect,
Excellent, and Absolute in all Vertuous Actions than any Man of what
Qualitie soever, _Interlarded with Poetry." Per contra,_ the learned
Acidalius published a book in Latin and afterwards in French, to prove
that women are not reasonable creatures. Modern theologians are at worst
merely sub-acid, and do not always say so, if they think so. Meanwhile
most persons have been content to leave the world to go on its old
course, in this matter as in others, and have thus acquiesced in that
stern judicial decree, with which Timon of Athens sums up all his curses
upon womankind,--"If there sit twelve women at the table, let a dozen of
them be--as they are."

Ancient or modern, nothing