Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/151

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Perhaps, on the whole, he had no great reason to speak well of the sex, for in one place, as if he looked upon marriage, like friendship, as a lottery, he moralises to the effect—

But, if his witness is true, mercenary parents were as common of old as in our own day. He was led, both by his exclusiveness as an aristocrat, and his impatience of a mere money-standard of worth, to a disgust of—

And that he did ponder the regeneration of society, and strive to fathom the depths of the education question agitated in the old world, we know from a passage in his elegies, which, though we have no clue to the time he wrote it, deserves to be given in this place, both as connected with his notions about birth, and as