Page:Women in the Fine Arts From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentiet.djvu/29

xxii the English Court, as the Italians crossed the Alps to serve the kings of France.

English women of this century were far less scholarly than those of Italy and France. At the same time they might well be proud of a queen who "could quote Pindar and Homer in the original and read every morning a portion of Demosthenes, being also the royal mistress of eight languages." With our knowledge of the queen's scholarship in mind we might look to her for such patronage of art and literature as would rival that of Lorenzo the Magnificent; but Elizabeth lacked the generosity of the Medici and that of Marguerite de Valois. Hume tells us that "the queen's vanity lay more in shining by her own learning than in encouraging men of genius by her liberality."

Lady Jane Grey and the daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke are familiar examples of learned women, and many English titled and gentlewomen were well versed in Greek and Latin, as well as in Spanish, Italian, and French. Macaulay reminded his readers that if an Englishwoman of that day did not read the classics she could read little, since the then existing books — outside the Italian—would fill a shelf but scantily. Thus English girls read Plato, and doubtless English women excelled Englishmen in their proficiency in foreign languages, as they do at present.

In Germany the relative position of Art and Letters was the opposite to that in France and England. The School of Cologne was a genuinely native school of art in the