Thus, too, we have Theodore
Agrippa d'Aubigne writing to his daughters about the learned
women of his century, and cautioning them, in conclusion,
that the study of letters was unsuited to ladies of a
middling station, and should be reserved for princesses. (1)
And once more, if we desire to see the same principle carried
to ludicrous extreme, we shall find that Reverend Father in
God the Abbot of Brantome, claiming, on the authority of some
lord of his acquaintance, a privilege, or rather a duty, of
free love for great princesses, and carefully excluding other
ladies from the same gallant dispensation. (2) One sees the
spirit in which these immunities were granted; and how they
were but the natural consequence of that awe for courts and
kings that made the last writer tell us, with simple wonder,
how Catherine de Medici would "laugh her fill just like
another" over the humours of pantaloons and zanies. And such
servility was, of all things, what would touch most nearly
the republican spirit of Knox. It was not difficult for him
to set aside this weak scruple of loyalty. The lantern of
his analysis did not always shine with a very serviceable
light; but he had the virtue, at least, to carry it into many
places of fictitious holiness, and was not abashed by the
tinsel divinity that hedged kings and queens from his
contemporaries.
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