should perch upon the silken fringes, or a slender ray of the sun
should pierce through the awning;" while, if they "go any distance
to see their estates in the country, or to hunt at a meeting
collected for their amusement by others, they think that they have
equalled the marches of Alexander or of Caesar."

On the wives, widows, and daughters of men of this stamp--and not
half their effeminacy and baseness, as the honest rough old soldier
Ammianus Marcellinus describes it, has been told here--the news
brought from Egypt worked with wondrous potency.

Women of the highest rank awoke suddenly to the discovery that life
was given them for nobler purposes than that of frivolous enjoyment
and tawdry vanity. Despising themselves; despising the husbands to
whom they had been wedded in loveless marriages de convenance, whose
infidelities they had too often to endure: they, too, fled from a
world which had sated and sickened them. They freed their slaves;
they gave away their wealth to found hospitals and to feed the poor;
and in voluntary poverty and mean garments they followed such men as
Jerome and Ruffinus across the seas, to visit the new found saints
of the Egyptian desert, and to end their days, in some cases, in
doleful monasteries in Palestine. The lives of such women as those
of the Anician house; the lives of Marcella and Furia, of Paula, of
the Melanias, and the rest, it is not my task to write. They must
be told by a woman, not by a man. We may blame those ladies, if we
will, for neglecting their duties. We may sneer, if we will, at the
weaknesses--the aristocratic pride, the spiritual vanity--which we
fancy that we discover. We may lament--and in that we shall not be
wrong--the influence which such men as Jerome obtained over them--
the example and precursor of so much which has since then been