my shaft wherewith I shoot and miss not!” Another tells us, “I stood at the gate of Heaven, and lo! most of its inmates were poor, and I stood at the gate of Hell, and lo! most of its inmates were women.’’[FN#340] “Take care of the glass-phials!” cried the Prophet to a camel-guide singing with a sweet voice.  Yet the Meccan Apostle made, as has been seen, his own household produce two perfections.  The blatant popular voice follows with such “dictes” as, “Women are made of nectar and poison”; “Women have long hair and short wits” and so forth.  Nor are the Hindus behindhand.  Woman has fickleness implanted in her by Nature like the flashings of lightning (Katha s.s. i. 147); she is valueless as a straw to the heroic mind (169); she is hard as adamant in sin and soft as flour in fear (170) and, like the fly, she quits camphor to settle on compost (ii.  I7).  “What dependence is there in the crowing of a hen?” (women’s opinions) says the Hindi proverb; also “A virgin with grey hairs!” (i.e. a monster) and, “Wherever wendeth a fairy face a devil wendeth with her.”  The same superficial view of holding woman to be lesser (and very inferior) man is taken generally by the classics; and Euripides distinguished himself by misogyny, although he drew the beautiful character of Alcestis.  Simonides, more merciful than Ecclesiastes, after naming his swine-women, dog-women, cat-women, etc., ends the decade with the admirable bee-woman, thus making ten per cent. honest.  In mediaeval or Germanic Europe the doctrine of the Virgin mother gave the sex a status unknown to the Ancients except in Egypt, where Isis was the help-mate and completion of Osiris, in modern parlance “The Woman clothed with the Sun.”  The kindly and courtly Palmerin of England, in whose pages “gentlemen may find their choice of sweet inventions and gentlewomen be satisfied with courtly expectations,” suddenly blurts out, “But in truth women are never satisfied by reason, being governed by accident or appetite” (chaps. xlix).

The Nights, as might be expected from the emotional East, exaggerate these views.  Women are mostly “Sectaries of the god Wuensch”; beings of impulse, blown about by every gust of passion; stable only in instability; constant only in inconstancy.  The false ascetic, the perfidious and murderous crone and the old hag-procuress who pimps like Umm Kulsum,[FN#341] for mere pleasure, in the luxury of sin, are drawn with an experienced and loving hand.  Yet not the less do we meet with examples of the dutiful daughter, the model lover matronly in her affection, the devoted wife, the perfect mother, the saintly devotee, the learned preacher, Univira the chaste widow and the self-sacrificing heroic woman.  If we find (vol. iii. 216) the sex described as:—­

          An offal cast by kites where’er they list,