Excommunication, indeed!  Not even the church could have carried on that war long.  Every word of this marks the degradation to which those monkish times would have made the sex submit, “velamina concessa insipientiam earum!” and pretty well for men of the cloth of that day’s make, to speak of women’s “lasciviam et luxuriam,” when, perhaps, the hypocritical mandate arose from nothing but a desire in the coelibatists themselves to get a sly peep at the neatly turned feet and ankles of the women.  One would almost think the old nursery song of

  —­“The beggar whose name was Stout,
  He cut her petticoats all round about,
  He cut her petticoats far above her knee, &c.,”

was written to perpetuate the mandate.  Certainly a “Stout beggar was the Papal church.”  “Consistent with modesty,” “sicut decet verecundiam sexus;” nothing can beat that bare-faced hypocrisy.  So when afterwards the sex shortened their petticoats, other Simon Pures start up and put them in the stocks for immodesty.  Poor women!  Here was a wrong, Eusebius.  Long or short, they were equally immodest.  Immodest, indeed!  Nature has clad them with modesty and temperance—­their natural habit—­other garment is conventional.  I admire what Oelian says of Phocion’s wife.

  “[Greek:  Empeicheto de prote te sophrosune,
    deuterois ge men tois parousi.]”

“She first arrayed herself in temperance, and then put on what was necessary.”  Every seed of beauty is sown by modesty.  It is woman’s glory, “[Greek:  he gar aidos anthos epispeirei]” says Clearchus in his first book of Erotics, quoting from Lycophronides.  The appointment of magistrates at Athens, [Greek:  gunaikokosmoi], to regulate the dress of women, was a great infringement on their rights—­the origin of men-milliners.  You are one, Eusebius, who

  “Had rather hear the tedious tales
  Of Hollingshed, than any thing that trenches
  On love.”

I remember how, in contempt of the story of the Ephesian matron, you had your Petronius interleaved, and filled it with anecdotes of noble virtue, till the comment far exceeded the text—­then, finding your excellent women in but bad company, you tore out the text of Petronius, and committed it to the flames.  Preserve your precious catalogue of female worthies—­often have you lamented that of Hesiod was lost, of all the [Greek:  Hoiai megalai] Alcmena alone remaining, and you will not make much boast of her.  How far back would you go for the wrongs of women—­do you intend to write a library—­a library in a series of novels in three volumes—­what are all that are published but “wrongs of women?” Could but the Lion have written!  Books have been written by men, and be sure they have spared themselves—­and yet what a catalogue of wrongs we have from the earliest date!  Even the capture of Helen was not with her consent; and how lovely she is! and how indicative is that wondrous history of a high chivalrous spirit