Frontispiece Facing page 96 LADY VENETIA DIGBY From the Painting by Vandyke MARY SIDNEY, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE From the Portrait by Mark Gerards MRS. COWPER From the Portrait by D. Heins DOROTHY SIDNEY, COUNTESS OF SUNDERLAND Chapter One: The Inspiration of Poetry BY Y Heaven," says Biron in "Love's Labour's Lost," "I do love; and it hath taught me to rhyme and to be melancholy." By far the greatest part of the influence of women upon poetry has hitherto been of the unconscious kind; they have been the subject and the inspiration of many poems. In civilisations where the conscious intelligence of men treated women as altogether inferior, this was the only direct influence possible. In Greece, for example, it is clear that man saw in woman "no other end than to minister to his pleasure or to become the mother of his children." It is also clear that there must have been women to help Euripides to the liberal view expressed in the Medea" and the Alcestis," to his sympathy with "the dumb and age-long protest of the weaker against the stronger sex": who they were we shall never know. The position of women was not better in Rome, though here as everywhere, and at all times, a woman of magical or grand character could make her own world. The Roman father had the right to marry his daughter against her will and then to dissolve her marriage and take her away from husband, child, and " |