At this epoch, the influence of women was decidedly beneficial; happy for them and for society if it had continued to be so!  If we attempt to trace the source of this influence, we shall find it in the intellectual equality of the two sexes; equally ignorant of what we call knowledge, the respect due by men to virtue and beauty was not checked by any disdain of real or fancied superiority on their part.

The intellectual exercises (chiefly imaginative) of the time, so far from forming a barrier between the two sexes, were a bond of union.  The song of the minstrel was devoted to the praise of beauty, and paid by her smile.  The spirit of the age, as imbodied in these effusions, is the best proof of the beneficial influence exercised over that age by our sex.  In them, the name of woman is not associated in the degrading catalogue of man’s pleasures, with his bottle and his horse, but is coupled with all that is fair and pure in nature,—­the fields, the birds, the flowers; or high in virtue or sentiment,—­with honour, glory, self-sacrifice.

To the age of chivalry succeeded the revival of letters; and (strange to say!) this revival was any thing but advantageous to the cause of women.  Men found other paths to glory than the exercise of valour afforded, and paths into which women were forbidden to follow them.  Into these newly-discovered regions, women were not allowed to penetrate, and men returned thence with real or affected contempt for their unintellectual companions, without having attained true wisdom enough to know how much they would gain by their enlightenment.

The advance of intelligence in men not being met by a corresponding advance in women, the latter lost their equilibrium in the social balance.  Honour, glory, were no longer attached to the smile of beauty.  The dethroned sovereigns, from being imperious, became abject, and sought, by paltry arts, to perpetuate the empire which was no longer conceded as a right.  Influence they still possessed, but an influence debased in its character, and changed in its mode of operation.  Instead of being the objects of devotion of heart,—­fantastic, indeed, but high-minded,—­they became the mere playthings of the imagination, or worse, the mere objects of sensual passion.  Respect is the only sure foundation of influence.  Women had ceased to be respected:  they therefore ceased to be beneficially influential.  That they retained another and a worse kind of influence, may be inferred from the spirit, as imbodied in the literature, of the period.  Fiction no longer sought its heroes among the lofty in mind and pure in morals—­its heroines in spotless virgins and faithful wives.  The reckless voluptuary, the faithless and successful adulteress,—­these were the noble beings whose deeds filled the pages which formed the delight of the wise and the fair.  The ultimate issues of these grievous errors were most strikingly developed in the respective courts of Louis XIV. and Charles