more abandoned, this delicate and poetical lover requests, as a last favour, that she will, for the future, take some trouble to deceive him more effectually; and the fair one, can she do less? kindly consents! Cynthia, the mistress of Propertius, gets tipsey, overturns the supper-table, and throws the cups at her lover's head; he is delighted with her playfulness: she leaves him to follow the camp with a soldier; he weeps and laments: she returns to him again, and he is enchanted with her amiable condescension. Her excesses are such, that he is reduced to blush for her and for himself; and he confesses that he is become, for her sake, the laughing-stock of all Rome. Cynthia is the only one of these classical loves who seems to have possessed any mental accomplishments. The poet praises, incidentally, her talents for music and poetry; but not as if they added to her charms or enhanced her value in his estimation. The Lesbia* of Catullus, whose eyes were red with weeping the loss of her favourite * Clodia, the wife of Quintus Metellus Celer. sparrow, crowned a life of the most flagitious excesses by poisoning her husband. Of the various ladies celebrated by Horace and Tibullus, it would really be difficult to discover which was most worthless, venal, and profligate. These were the refined loves of the classic poets! The passion they celebrated never seems to have inspired one ennobling or generous sentiment, nor to have lifted them for one moment above the grossest selfishness. They had no scruple in exhibiting their mistresses to our eyes, as doubtless they appeared in their own, degraded by every vice, and in every sense contemptible; beings, not only beyond the pale of our sympathy, but of our toleration. Throughout their works, virtue appears a mere jest: Love stript of his divinity, even by those who first deified him, is what we disdain to call by that name; sentiment, as we now understand the word,--that is, the union of fervent love with reverence and deli cacy towards its object,―a thing unknown and unheard of,—and all is " of the earth, earthy." It is for women I write; the fair, pure-hearted, delicate-minded, and unclassical reader will recollect that I do not presume to speak of these poets critically, being neither critic nor scholar; but merely with a reference to my subject, and with a reference to my sex. As monuments of the language and literature of a great and polished people, rich with a thousand beauties of thought and style, doubtless they have their value and their merit: but as monuments also of a state of morals inconceivably gross and corrupt; of the condition of women degraded by their own vices, the vices and tyranny of the other sex, and the prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, the tendency of which, (however disguised by rhetoric,) was ever to lower the tone of the mind; considered in this point of view, they might as well have all burned together in that vast bonfire of love-poetry which the Doctors of the Church raised at Constantinople-what a flame it must have made !* * "J'ai ouï dire dans mon enfance à Demetrius Chalcondyle, homme très instruit de tout ce qui regarde la Grèce, qui les Prétres avaient eu assez d'influence sur les Empereurs de Constantinople, pour les engager à brûler les ouvrages de plusieurs anciens poëtes Grecs, et en particulier de ceux qui parlaient des amours, &c. * * * Ces prêtres, sans doute, montrèrent une malveillance honteuse envers les anciens poëtes; mais ils donnerent une grande preuve d'integrité, de probité, et de religion."-ALCYONIUS. This sentiment is put into the mouth of Leo X. at a time when the mania of classical learning was at its height.-See Roscoe, (Leo X.) and Ginguené. CHAPTER III. THE LOVES OF THE TROUBADOURS. Gente, che d'amor gívan ragionando.-PETRARCA. THE irruptions of the northern nations, among whom our sex was far better appreciated than among the polished Greeks and Romans; the rise of Christianity, and the institution of chivalry, by changing the moral condition of women, gave also a totally different, character to the homage addressed to them. It was in the ages called gothic and barbarous,-in that era of high feelings and fierce passions,-of love, war, and wild adventure, that the sex began to take their true station in society. From the midst of ignorance, superstition, and ferocity, sprung up that |