heartily shook him by the hand to convince him you were in your senses; which action he nevertheless put to the credit of the soundness of your heart, and not a bit to that of your head.  You saw it—­and immediately, with a trifling flaw in the application quite worthy yourself, reminded me of a passage in a letter from Lord Bolingbroke to Swift, that “The truest reflection, and at the same time the bitterest satire, which can be made on the present age, is this, that to think as you think, will make a man pass for romantic.  Sincerity, constancy, tenderness, are rarely to be found.  They are so much out of use, that the man of mode imagines them to be out of nature.”  So insane and romantic, you added, are synonymous terms to this incredulous, this matter-of-fact world, that, like the unbelieving Thomas, trusts in, believes in nothing that it does not touch and handle.  Your partiality for days of chivalry blinds you a little.  The men were splendid—­women shone with their reflected splendour—­you see them through an illuminated haze, and, as you were not behind the curtain, imagine their minds as cultivated as their beauty was believed to be great.  The mantle of chivalry hid all the wrongs, but the particular ones from which they rescued them.  If the men are worse, our women are far better—­more like those noble Roman ladies, intellectual and high-minded, whom you have ever esteemed the worthiest of history.  Then women were valued.  Valerius Maximus gives the reason why women had the upper-hand.  After the mother of Coriolanus and other Roman women had preserved their country, how could the senate reward them?—­“Sanxit uti foeminis semita viri cederent—­permisit quoque his purpurea veste et aureis uti segmentis.”  It was sanctioned by the senate, you perceive, that men should yield the wall to the sex, in honour, and that they should be allowed the distinction of purple vests and golden borders—­privileges the female world still enjoy.  Yet in times you love to applaud, the paltry interference of men would have curtailed one of these privileges.  For a mandate was issued by the papal legate in Germany in the 14th century, decreeing, that “the apparel of women, which ought to be consistent with modesty, but now, through their foolishness, is degenerated into wantonness and extravagance, more particularly the immoderate length of their petticoats, with which they sweep the ground, be restrained to a moderate fashion, agreeably to the decency of the sex, under pain of the sentence of excommunication.”  “Velamina etiam mulierum, quae ad verecundiam designandam eis sunt concessa, sed nunc, per insipientiam earum, in lasciviam et luxuriam excreverunt, it immoderata longitudo superpelliccorum quibus pulverem trahunt, ad moderatum usum, sicut decet verecundiam sexus, per excommunicationis sententiam cohibeantur.”