In harmony with this are the various maxims and bon mots of eminent men, in respect to women.  Niebuhr thought he should not have educated a girl well,—­he should have made her know too much.  Lessing said, “The woman who thinks is like the man who puts on rouge, ridiculous.”  Voltaire said, “Ideas are like beards; women and young men have none.”  And witty Dr. Maginn carries to its extreme the atrocity:  “We like to hear a few words of sense from a woman, as we do from a parrot, because they are so unexpected.”  Yet how can we wonder at these opinions, when the saints have been severer than the sages? since the pious Fenelon taught that true virgin delicacy was almost as incompatible with learning as with vice,—­and Dr. Channing complained, in his “Essay on Exclusion and Denunciation,” of “women forgetting the tenderness of their sex” and arguing on theology.

Now this impression of feminine inferiority may be right or wrong, but it obviously does a good deal towards explaining the facts it takes for granted.  If contempt does not originally cause failure, it perpetuates it.  Systematically discourage any individual or class, from birth to death, and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to acquiesce in their degradation, if not to claim it as a crown of glory.  If the Abbe Choisi praised the Duchesse de Fontanges for being “beautiful as an angel and silly as a goose,” it was natural that all the young ladies of the court should resolve to make up in folly what they wanted in charms.  All generations of women having been bred under the shadow of intellectual contempt, they have of course done much to justify it.  They have often used only for frivolous purposes even the poor opportunities allowed them.  They have employed the alphabet, as Moliere said, chiefly in spelling the verb Amo.  Their use of science has been like that of Mlle. de Launay, who computed the decline in her lover’s affection by his abbreviation of their evening walk in the public square, preferring to cross it rather than take the circuit,—­“From which I inferred,” she says, “that his passion had diminished in the ratio between the diagonal of a rectangular parallelogram and the sum of two adjacent sides.”  And their conception, even of Art, has been too often on the scale of Properzia de Rossi, who carved sixty-five heads on a walnut, the smallest of all recorded symbols of woman’s sphere.

All this might perhaps be overcome, if the social prejudice which discourages woman would only reward proportionately those who surmount the discouragement.  The more obstacles the more glory, if society would only pay in proportion to the labor; but it does not.  Women, being denied not merely the antecedent training which prepares for great deeds, but the subsequent praise and compensation which follow them, have been weakened in both directions.  The career of eminent men ordinarily begins with colleges and the memories of Miltiades, and ends with fortune and fame; woman begins under discouragement, and ends beneath the same.  Single, she works with half-preparation and half-pay; married, she puts name and wages into the keeping of her husband, shrinks into John Smith’s “lady” during life, and John Smith’s “relict” on her tombstone; and still the world wonders that her deeds, like her opportunities, are inferior.