mythologies and poems, where she appears as Sita in the Ramayana, a form of tender purity, as the Egyptian Isis,* of divine wisdom never yet surpassed. In Egypt, too, the Sphynx, walking the earth with lion tread, looked out upon its marvels in the calm, inscrutable beauty of a virgin's face, and the Greek could only add wings to the great emblem. In Greece, Ceres and Proserpine, significantly termed “the great goddesses," were seen seated, side by side. They needed not to rise for any worshipper or any change; they were prepared for all things, as those initiated to their mysteries knew. More obvious is the meaning of these three forms, the Diana, Minerva, and Vesta. Unlike in the ex

pression of their beauty, but alike in this-that each was self-sufficing. Other forms were only accessories and illustrations, none the complement to one like these. Another might, indeed, be the companion, and the Apollo and Diana set off one another's beauty. Of the Vesta, it is to be observed, that not only deep-eyed, deep-discerning Greece, but ruder Rome, who represents the only form of good man, (the always busy warrior), that could be indifferent to woman, confided the permanence of its glory to a tutelary goddess, and her wisest legislator spoke of meditation as a nymph.

Perhaps in Rome the neglect of woman was a reaction on the manners of Etruria, where the priestess Queen, warrior Queen, would seem to have been so usual a character.

An instance of the noble Roman marriage, where the stern and calm nobleness of the nation was common to both, we see in the historic page through the little that is told us

*For an adequate description of the Isis, see Appendix A.

of Brutus and Portia. Shakspeare has seized on the relation in its native lineaments, harmonizing the particular with the universal; and, while in its conjugal love, and no other, making it unlike the same relation, as seen in Cymbeline, or Othello, even as one star differeth from another in glory.

"By that great vow

Which did incorporate and make us one,
Unfold to me, yourself, your half,

Why you are heavy. *

Dwell I but in the suburbs

Of your good pleasure? If it be no more,
Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife."

Mark the sad majesty of his tone in answer.

Who

would not have lent a long-life credence to that voice of honour?

"You are my true and honourable wife;

As dear to me as are the ruddy drops

That visit this sad heart."

It is the same voice that tells the moral of his life in the past words

"Countrymen,

My heart doth joy, that yet in all my life,
I found no man but he was true to me."

It was not wonderful that it should be so.

Shakspeare, however, was not content to let Portia rest her plea for confidence on the essential nature of the marriage bond.

"I grant I am a woman; but withal,

A woman that lord Brutus took to wife.

I grant I am but a woman; withal,

A woman well reputed-Cato's daughter.
Think you I am no stronger than my sex,

Being so fathered and so husbanded?"

And afterwards, in the very scene where Brutus is suffering under that "insupportable and touching loss," the death of his wife, Cassius pleads

"Have you not love enough to bear with me,
When that rash humour which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?

Brutus.-Yes, Cassius; and henceforth,

When you are over-earnest with your Brutus,

He'll think your mother chides and leaves you so."

As indeed it was a frequent belief among the ancients, as with our Indians, that the body was inherited from the mother, the soul from the father. As in that noble passage of Ovid, already quoted, where Jupiter, as his divine synod are looking down on the funeral pyre of Hercules, thus triumphs

Nic nisi materna Vulcanum parte potentem

Sentiet. Aeturnum est, à me quod traxit, et expers
At que immunc necis, nullaque domabile flamma
Idque ego defunctum terrà cœlestibus oris
Accipiam, cunctisque meum lætabile factum
Dis fore confido.

"The part alone of gross maternal frame

Fire shall devour, while that from me he drew
Shall live immortal and its force renew;

That when he's dead, I'll rise to realms above :
Let all the powers the righteous act aprove."

It is indeed a good speaking of his union with an earthly woman, but it expresses the common Roman thought as to

marriage; the same which permitted a man to lend his wife to a friend, as if she were a chattel.

"She dwelt but in the suburbs of his good pleasure."

Yet the same city, as I have said, leaned on the worship of Vesta, the Preserver, and in latter times was devoted to that of Isis. In Sparta, thought, in this respect as in all others, was expressed in the characters of real life, and the women of Sparta were as much Spartans as the men. The citoyen, citoyenne of France was here actualized. Was not the calm equality they enjoyed as honourable as the devotion of chivalry? They intelligently shared the ideal life of their nation.

Like the men, they felt,

"Honour gone, all's gone,

Better never had been born."

They were the true friends of men. The Spartan, surely, would not think that he received only his body from his mother. The sage, had he lived in that community, could not have thought the souls of "vain and foppish men will be degraded after death, to the forms of women, and if they do not there make great efforts to retrieve themselves, will become birds."

(By the way, it is very expressive of the hard intellectuality of the merely mannish mind, to speak thus of birds, chosen always by the feminine poet as the symbols of his fairest thoughts.)

We are told of the Greek nations in general, that woman occupied there an infinitely lower place than man. It is difficult to believe this when we see such range and dignity

of thought on the subject in the mythologies, and find the poets producing such ideals as Cassandra, Iphigenia, Antigone, Macaria, where Sibylline priestesses told the oracle of the highest god, and he could not be content to reign with a court of fewer than nine muses. Even Victory

wore a female form.

But whatever were the facts of daily life, I cannot complain of the age and nation, which represents its thought by such a symbol as I see before me at this moment. It is a zodiac of the busts of gods and goddesses, arranged in pairs. The circle breathes the music of a heavenly order. Male and female heads are distinct in expression, but equal in beauty, strength and calmness. Each male head is that of a brother and a king-each female of a sister and a queen. Could the thought, thus expressed, be lived out, there would be nothing more to be desired. There would be unison in variety, congeniality in difference.

Coming nearer our own time, we find religion and poetry no less true in their revelations. The rude man, just disengaged from the sod, the Adam, accuses woman to his God, and records her disgrace to their posterity. He is not ashamed to write that he could be drawn from heaven by one beneath him, one made, he says, from but a small part of himself. But in the same nation, educated by time, instructed by a succession of prophets, we find woman in as high a position as she has ever occupied. No figure that has ever arisen to greet our eyes has been received with more fervent reverence than that of the Madonna. Heine calls her the Dame du Comptoir of the Catholic church, and this jeer well expresses a serious truth.