Part 12

XXVIII. A certain philosopher, being asked what tint gave the most graceful hue to a woman’s countenance, answered with much truth and perspicuity, modesty; and I am really of opinion, that it is the greatest advantage the women can claim over the men. Modesty is a screen or fence, which nature seems to have placed between virtue and vice, and is, as a discreet French author observes, the shield of fine souls, and the visible character of virtue: and St. Bernard extends the simile still farther, illustrating it with the epithets of the precious gem of manners, the torch of the chaste soul, and the sister of continence; the guardian of fame, honour and life, the foundation of virtue, the pride of nature, and the symbol of all honesty (Serm. 86, in Cant.) and Diogenes ingeniously and properly calls it the symbol of virtue. In fact, this is the great and formidable bulwark, which nature has raised, and placed in front, to oppose vice, and to serve as a shelter and covering to the whole fortress of the soul; and, as Nazianzenus said, when this is once subdued, no farther resistance can be made to every kind of vicious outrage. _Protinus extincto subeunt mala cuncta pudore._

XXIX. It may be said, that modesty is a signal preservative against exterior assaults, but not against interior acquiescence; and thus a door always is left open, at which vice may make a triumphal entry, which may be effected by the means of invisible attacks, in parts, that are not sheltered or protected by the wall of modesty. But even admitting that such a thing might happen, shame would ever remain a most valuable preservative, and be the cause of preventing an infinite deal of scandal, and the fatal consequences attending it. Upon serious reflection it will be found, that, if it does not defend totally, it is in a great measure a protection even against those silent and secret assaults, which scarce ever peep out or shew themselves beyond the occult recesses of the soul: for internal consentings are very rare, when they are not excited by some sort of attempts, for these are the things which radicate criminal affections in the soul, and also those which augment and strengthen propensities to vice. It is true, that without these stimulants, we now and then see turpitude introduce itself into the spirit; but he does not seem to lodge there as if he was at home, or like the master of the house, but only as a stranger or a sojourner.

XXX. The passions, without the aliment that nourishes them, lay very languid, and act very timidly, especially in persons who are much addicted to blush; and those, in whom there is such a frank and easy commerce between the bosom and the countenance, are always under apprehensions, left the most secret operations of their breasts, should be exposed to public view on the parade of their faces. In fact, if upon every occasion, their most private or concealed affections are blazoned on their cheeks, the glow of the blush, seems the only tint, with which the images of invisible objects can be painted or described; and thus, the fear of being liable to have what is impressed in their minds read in their faces, becomes a rein, which confines and checks the dangerous sallies of desire.

XXXI. To this may be added, that the colour is so apt to rise in the countenances of some of them, that they will often blush at themselves. This heroic excellence, or type of modesty, which the ingenious father Viera celebrates in one of his sermons, is not, as some coarse spirits have termed it, purely ideal, but in persons of the most noble sentiments and dispositions, real, and natural. This was well known to Demetrius Phalereus, who, when he was instructing the youth of Athens, enjoined them, that at home they should behave with modesty to their parents, that abroad they should observe the same deportment to every one they saw, and that in private they should preserve a decency and a modest carriage even to themselves.

SECT. V.

XXXII. I think I have pointed out as many advantages on the side of the women, as will balance, if not out-weigh, the qualities in which the men excel. Who now is to give sentence in this plea? If I had authority to do it, I might perhaps pronounce a short one, declaring, that the qualities in which the women excel, conduce to make them better in themselves; and that those in which the men excel, make them better for, or, to speak more properly, of greater use to the public; though as I am not exercising the office of a judge, but only that of an advocate, the cause must for the present remain undecided.

XXXIII. And even supposing I had the necessary authority to determine, I should be obliged to suspend giving judgment, as it might be urged on behalf of the men, that the good qualities which are attributed to the women are common to both sexes: I confess they are, but the same thing may be said with equal justice with respect to those of the men. In order not to confound the question, it will be necessary to point out the good qualities which are more frequently found in the individuals of one sex, and seldomer in those of the other. I grant then, that you meet with men who are docile, candid, and capable of blushing; and I will add, that blushing, which is a good symptom in women, is a better still in men, because it denotes a generous nature and much ingenuity; which John Barclay has more than once declared in his Satyricon; and it can’t be denied, that the opinion of a man of his subtile genius, is a vote of great consequence in such a question; and although this may not be an infallible sign, I myself have made so much observation in these matters as to be convinced, that no great expectations can be formed of a boy, who is audacious and forward.

XXXIV. I say then, that various individuals of our sex, may be observed to possess the fine qualities which enoble the other, though not with the same frequency; but this by no means inclines the balance in our favour, because, on the other hand, the perfections the men boast of, being communicated to many women, have equal weight in the opposite scale.

SECT. VI.

XXXV. There have been a thousand examples of princesses, who were expert and able politicians. No age will ever forget the first woman, whose true character history developed and rescued from the obscurity of fable: I mean Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, who in her infancy was nursed by doves, but afterwards soared superior to the eagles: she not only knew how to make herself blindly obeyed by the subjects her husband had left her, but she also made subjects of all the neighbouring nations, and by extending her conquests, she likewise made neighbours of the most distant ones. Her empire extended on one side to Ethiopia, and on the other to India. Nor can Artemisia, queen of Caria, be forgotten, who not only maintained, during her long widowhood, the respect and adoration of that kingdom; but, being invaded by the Rhodians, she, in her own territories, by two singular stratagems, with two attacks only destroyed the troops of her enemies; and, passing suddenly from the defensive to the offensive, she invaded them in her turn, and conquered and triumphed over the island of Rhodes. The two Aspasias also will be ever remembered, to whose admirable management, Pericles the husband of one of them, and Cyrus the son of Darius Notho, gallant of the other, happily and successfully, confided the government of their states; as will likewise the most prudent Phile, daughter of Antipater, whom, while she was a child, her father advised with concerning the government of the kingdom of Macedonia, and who afterwards, by her wise stratagems and great address, extricated her husband, the precipitate and flighty Demetrius, from a thousand difficulties. Livia, of fertile invention, whose subtile cunning seems to have been too deep for the penetration of Augustus, is another instance of female ability, for she could never have had such dominion over his mind, if he had known her. The sagacious Agrippina is likewise another, although her arts, as she unhappily employed them in promoting her son Nero to the throne, were fatal to herself and the world. Amalethunsa also, is well deserving of being reckoned among the women of great talents, in whom, her understanding all the languages of every nation subject to the Roman empire, was esteemed an inferior accomplishment, compared to the great skill and address, which she displayed in governing the state during the minority of her son Athalaricus.

XXXVI. Nor, passing over many others, and approaching nearer to our own times, should we ever forget Elizabeth of England, in whose composition, the influx of the three Graces concurred equally with that of the three Furies. Her conduct as a sovereign, would ever remain the admiration of Europe, if her vices were not so interwoven with her maxims of government, as to make it impossible to separate them; and her political image, will ever present itself to posterity, coloured, or, to speak more properly, stained and blemished with the blood of the innocent Mary Stewart, queen of Scots. Neither should we forget Catharine of Medicis, queen of France, whose sagacity in negotiating and maintaining a balance between the opposite parties of Calvinists and Catholics, in order to save the crown from a precipice, resembled the dexterity of a rope-dancer, who, mounted on a cord, by his ready art and address at poising himself with the weights at the ends of his poles, secures himself from falling, and delights and amuses the spectators, by displaying the risque, at the same time that he dextrously avoids the danger. Our own queen Isabella, would not have been inferior to any of them in the business of administration and government, if, instead of a queen consort, she had been a queen-regent. Under all this disadvantage, when proper occasions presented themselves, she manifested by her actions, that she was a woman of consummate prudence and ability; and Lawrance Beyerlink in his eulogium of her, says, that no great thing was done in her time, in which she did not assist, or was wholly the author of. _Quid magni in regno, sine illa, imo nisi per illam ferè gestum est?_ At least the discovery of the new world, which was an event the most glorious for Spain that had fallen out in the course of many ages, would certainly never have been effected or accomplished, but for the magnanimity of Isabella, who dispelled the fears, and vanquished the sloth of Ferdinand.

XXXVII. In fine, and what seems to have more weight than all the rest, it appears to me, although I am not very certain of the computation, that among the queens who have reigned for any length of time as absolute sovereigns, the greatest part of them, have been celebrated in history for excellent governors. But the poor women, are still so unhappy, as always to have trumped up against this train of illustrious examples, a Brunequilda, a Fredegunda, the two Joans of Naples, and a few others; but, by the way, the two first, although they abounded in mischief, did not want understanding.

XXXVIII. Nor is the world so universally persuaded as some may think, that a crown does not sit well on the head of a woman, because in an island or peninsula, which is formed by the Nile in Ethiopia, called Meroe, women, according to the testimony of Pliny, reigned for many successive ages. Father Cornelius Alapide, speaking of Saba, who was one of their queens, supposes, that her empire extended much beyond the limits of Meroe, and that it might possibly comprehend the greatest part of Ethiopia, grounding his opinion, upon an expression of our Saviour, who called her Queen of the South, which words seemed to imply, that she possessed vast dominions in that quarter. Thomas Cornelius also tells us, that authors were not wanting, who asserted, that Meroe was bigger than the island of Great Britain, and, if so, the territories of those queens were not very confined, though they did not extend beyond the limits of Meroe. Aristotle (Lib. 2. Polit. Cap. 7.) says, that among the Lacedemonians, the women had a great share in the political government; and that their being allowed it, is agreeable to the laws given them by Licurgus.

XXXIX. In Borneo also, according to the relation of Mandeslo, which may be seen in the second volume of Olearius, the women reign, and their husbands enjoy no other privilege, than that of being their most dignified subjects. In the island of Formosa, situated in the southern part of the Chinese sea, those idolaters who inhabit it, have such confidence in the prudent conduct of the women, that the Sacerdotal function, together with every thing which relates to religious matters, is confided wholly to them; and that, with regard to politics, they enjoy a power superior to that of the senators, they being considered as the interpreters of the will of their deities.

XL. Notwithstanding all this, the ordinary practice of nations is most conformable to reason, as it corresponds best with the divine decree notified to our first mother in Paradise, and to all her daughters in her name, which enjoins a subjection to the men; and we should only correct the impatience, which many people shew at submitting to female government, when according to the laws of the land they should obey; and we should also bridle that extravagant estimation for our own sex, which carries us such lengths, as to prefer the government of a weak child, to that of an able and experienced woman. The antient Persians were drawn by this prepossession to such a ridiculous extreme, that the widow of one of their princes happening to be left with child at the death of her husband, and being advised by their magi, that she had conceived a male, they crowned the belly of the queen, and before it was born, proclaimed the fœtus king by the name of Sapor.

SECT. VII.

XLI. We have hitherto treated of political prudence only, in the discussion of which point, we have contented ourselves with a few examples, and have omitted the many. It is needless to insist on the ability of women in point of œconomical prudence, as every day’s experience exhibits to us, houses and families extremely well governed by women, and very badly governed by men.

XLII. We shall next proceed to consider resolution as a property, which the men look upon as peculiarly annexed to, or inseparable from, their own sex. I admit that heaven has endowed them in comparison to the women, with a quadruple portion of this ingredient; but not that it was given them as an exempt property, peculiarly annexed to, and belonging to their sex only, and that the other was to be excluded from the least participation of it.

XLIII. Not an age has passed, which has not been ennobled and graced by women of eminence and worth; and without dwelling on the heroines of Scripture, and the martyrs to the law of grace, because actions, which are aided by the especial intervention of a supernatural hand, should be attributed to the divine power, and not to any natural virtue, or faculty of a sex: I say, without having recourse to these sort of examples, women of heroic valour, present themselves to the memory in crouds; and after the Semiramis’s, the Artamissas, the Thomyris, the Zenobias, there appears an Aretaphila, the wife of Nicrotatus, the sovereign of Cyrene in Libya, in whose incomparably generous nature, the greatest fortitude of mind, the most tender love of her country, and the most subtile and discerning understanding, contended for the pre-eminence; because, to deliver her country from the violent tyranny of her husband, and to revenge the murder, which, for the sake of possessing her he had perpetrated on her first consort, she made herself the leader of a conspiracy, and deprived Nicrotatus of the kingdom and his life. Leander, who inherited all his brother’s cruelty, having succeeded to the crown, she had the valour and address to rid the world of this second tyrant also; crowning in the end, all her heroic actions, by declining to accept the diadem, which from a grateful sense of the many benefits she had conferred on them, was offered to her by the Cyreneans. Denepetina, the daughter of the great Mithridates, and the inseparable companion and partner of her father, in all his dangerous undertakings and projects, in the execution of which she manifested upon every occasion, that strength of mind and body, which the singular circumstance of her coming into the world with double rows of teeth, seems to have foretold at her birth; after her father was defeated by the great Pompey, she was shut up and besieged in a castle by Manlius Priscus, where, finding it impossible to defend herself, she deprived herself of life, to avoid suffering the ignominy of being made a slave. An Arria, the wife of Cecinus Peto, whose husband having been concerned in the conspiracy of Camilus against the emperor Claudius, was for this crime condemned to death; and she, determined not to outlive her consort, having several times tried in vain to beat her head to pieces against a wall, procured at last to be introduced to her husband in prison, where she extorted from him a promise, to anticipate with his own hands the work of the executioner, and, by way of encouraging him to do it, immediately transfixed her own breast with a dagger. An Epponina, upon her husband Julius Sabinus having in Gaul arrogated to himself the title of Cæsar, endured, with rare constancy and fortitude, unspeakable toils; and being at last condemned to death by Vespasian, she frankly and openly told him, she should die contented, as death would deprive her of the disgust of seeing so bad an emperor as him on the throne.

XLIV. And, that it should not be thought the latter ages are inferior to the antient ones in resolute and courageous women, see the maid of Orleans present herself, and stand forth compleatly armed, as the pillar, which, in its greatest distress, supported the tottering monarchy of France; which she did so amazingly, that the English and French, who were as opposite in sentiments as in arms, imputed her extraordinary feats, the one to a diabolical compact, and the other to divine assistance. The English perhaps feigned the first, for the purpose of throwing an odium on their enemies; and those who had the management of affairs in France, suggested the other politically; for it was of vast importance, when the people and soldiers were so greatly dismayed, to raise their dejected spirits, by persuading them, that heaven had declared itself their ally, and introduced on the theatre of the world, a damsel of perspicuity and magnanimity, as an inspired instrument, which was equal to, and capable of effecting the miraculous succour. A Margaret of Denmark, in the fourteenth century, in her own person, headed an army, and conquered the kingdom of Sweden, taking king Albertus prisoner. The authors of those times, call her the second Semiramis. One Marulla, a native of Lemnos, an island in the Archipelago, when the fortress of Cochin was besieged, upon seeing her father slain, snatched up his sword and shield; and having prevailed on the whole garrison to follow her, she put herself at their head, and, encouraging them by her example, charged the enemy with such ardour, that she drove them from their trenches, and obliged the Basha Soliman to raise the siege: which action, the Venetian general Loredano, who was proprietor of the place, rewarded, by permitting her to chuse for a husband, whichever of the most illustrious captains of his army she liked best, promising at the same time, to settle on her and her consort, a fortune suitable to their rank, which he did in the name of the republic. One Blanca de Rossi, the wife of Baptista Porta, a Paduan captain, who, after defending valorously a post on the walls of Bassano, a fortress in the march of Tresvina, finding the place suddenly taken by treachery, and her husband made prisoner and put to death by the tyrant Ezelinus, and perceiving she had no means left to escape falling a victim to the brutal passion of that ravisher, who was furiously enamoured with her beauty; she threw herself out of the window of an upper room; but being afterwards, against her inclination, cured of the bruises she received, and enduring with anguish and regret under that oppressive barbarian, the shame of having been forced, she, to relieve the bitterness of her grief, and to extricate herself from continuing in a state of violation to her conjugal faith, deprived herself of life in the sepulchre of her husband, which for the purpose of doing it there she had caused to be opened. We could instance many other women of heroic courage, and particularize the occasions on which they exerted it; but, to avoid the recital appearing prolix or tedious, we shall omit the relation of them.

XLV. The reason of my not having yet mentioned the Amazons, which is a case so applicable to this matter, is, because I think it will be better to treat of them separately. Some authors, in opposition to many others who affirm it, deny their existence; but without engaging in this dispute, we must allow, that much fable has been mixed with the history of the Amazons; such as that they destroyed all their male children; that they lived in a total state of separation from the other sex, and only consorted with them once a year for the sake of becoming pregnant. Of a piece with these, are the tales of their encounters with Hercules and Theseus, and the succour given to afflicted Troy by the fierce Penthesilea, and perhaps that also, of the visit of queen Talestris to Alexander. But with all this, against the testimony and credit of so many antient authors, it would be rash to deny, that there was a formidable body of warlike women in Asia, who went by the name of Amazons.

XLVI. But in case this should be denied, in lieu of the Asiatic Amazonians they deprive us of, we should be supplied with another set, drawn from the other three parts of the globe, ready to stand forth and take their places. The Spaniards discovered American ones, navigating armed, on the river Maranon, which is the largest in the world, and to which, for this reason, they gave the name of the river of the Amazons. There are some of them in Africa, in a province of the empire of Monomotapa: and, it is said, they are the best soldiers in all that territory; there are not wanting geographers, who made Monomotapa a distinct state from the country these warlike women inhabit.