the pages, but did not stop to read, and then looked the book up in the "Thesaurus Antiquitatis et Eruditionis Reconditissima" in order to compose an appreciative reply to the donor. "My tastes," she said, "have never taken me to the myrtles of Venus," and, although she had offers of marriage-for she was a sprightly young thing, and by no means objected to admiration---she religiously observed her father's dying injunction not to "entangle herself with matrimony."

Was she a prig? Well, with all the incense burnt before her, and with all her varied talents, it would have been a miracle had she escaped. No other woman, we imagine, in those days, was allowed to attend University lectures, but she was admitted to a private box to hear Voët, and there (behind a cur tain) she listened to that rigid Calvinist, with no less a philosopher than Descartes sitting beside her. In her young days she was much interested in art of various kinds. She spent years in painting flowers and fruit, in cutting out paper in imitation of finest lace (as the Japanese do still), in embroidering tulips on silk, in sketching and painting portraits, carving portraits in boxwood and ivory, modelling in wax, and etching on glass and copper. She learned tapestry in three hours, "to every one's astonishment," as she complacently records. There is a Schur man Museum at Franeker full of these things, many of which reach a high measure of excellence, though she was too facile in many arts to be supreme in any one.

Especially was she fond of etching her own face, and sat assiduously to herself in a mirror. Several of these portraits are reproduced in Miss Birch's delightful volume, and it is evident, as we have hinted, that Anna was not above the joys of dress in those frivolous days of "one and twenty," and that she "was possessed of an

amusing vanity which redeems her" very solid merits "from all charge of inhumanity or dullness." We behold her, as etched by herself, in braided dress and lovely collar of point d'Alençon, with "her hair done in the Abyssinian fashion, having been evidently plaited in a hundred little pigtails at night, and then fluffed out in the morning into a short mane standing well out all round her head." "Tis very well, thought the admiring young gentlemen of Utrecht; but was it well in a "learned maid" who was recommending the study of history to Charles I.'s intelligent niece-they were fellow-students in Honthorst's school of art, and Princess Elizabeth perfected her anatomical studies by a fascinated attendance at surgical operations and dissections as the best means of attaining "that state of perfection in which we admire nothing as new upon earth"? More suitable is the engraving, which is preserved to us, of "the solemn and owl-like portrait of the author of these sentiments, crowned by the legend 'Rien ne m'étonne'!"

Indeed, Anna soon became solemn enough. All those charming minauderies went, along with the Abyssinian coiffure, under the rigorous rule of Rector Voët, whose views of life may be gathered from the exception he permitted to his general prohibition of mixed danc ing: husbands and wives were allowed to caper about together, provided that no one was looking on! When Voët took the Learned Maid in hand, and taught her Hebrew and other Oriental tongues, so that she might arrive at theological exactitude, she gave up crimped hair and lace collars. She wrote her Ethiopic grammar instead. Descartes was jealous of this new influence, and cooled towards the fair grammarian. "Voëtius," he wrote,

a gâté la Demoiselle Schurman, car au lieu qu'elle avait l'esprit excellent pour la poésie, la peinture et les autres gen

tillesses de cette nature, il y a déjà cinq ou six ans qu'il la possède tellement qu'elle ne s'occupe plus qu'aux controverses de la Théologie. Ce qui lui fait perdre la conversation de tous les honnêtes gens.

But the Demoiselle Schurman was essentially a Dutchwoman of her age. Just as she had devoted herself to those minute and painstaking arts, that representation of the actual which was the idea of art as it appeared to a nation awaking after long years of persecution to a renaissance, political and intellectual, without dreams and without mysticism, but strenuous, real, and intense; so she responded to dry religious discriminations, as hard and genuine as those Dutch genre paintings which the Grand Monarque contemptuously dismissed as "ces magots." The great field days of theological hair-splitting in Holland were nearly over, indeed, in Anna's time. Arminians and Gomarists, Supralapsarians and Infralapsa riaus, Remonstrants and Counter-remonstrants, had fought and died, and Calvinism in a slightly humanized form reigned in the land. But the controversy had left a dilectical edge on the popular mind. Every Dutch cobbler was a theologian, and all men argued. "For some decades,” as Miss Birch observes, "Holland was in the forefront of human progess, and a life like that of Anna van Schurman, lived amidst the many and great wonders of the Dutch Renaissance, seems to us who live in a less magnificent day most en. viable." She joined in the fray as an equal, and it aroused her indignation that men should resent women's participation in all intellectual studies. Her idols were two Englishwomen, Queen Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, whom she would "pit against all the illustrious women of ancient Greece and Rome." She corresponded with much earnestness with Prof. Rivet of Leyden, "protesting against the theory

which would allow only a minority of my sex to attain to what is, in the opinion of all men, most worth having," the pursuit of learning and letters.

Some object that the distaff and the needle supply women with all the scope they need. But I decline to accept this Lesbian rule, naturally preferring to listen to reason rather than to custom. By what right indeed are certain things alone apportioned to us? Is it God's law or man's? Those who would constrain us women have never tasted the harshness they would fain mete out.

The end of this extraordinary woman was not the least remarkable part of her life. After spending fifty years in art and scholarship, and attaining a high degree of accomplishment in both; after sitting at the feet of Voët and declaring herself a convinced Gomarist; she took to seeking for God, as the one and only aim of a worthy mind; she scorned her learning, and not only gave up studying the Scriptures in the original tongues, but even renounced all belief in their peculiar inspiration, saying that the words of the dead were as empty to her as "the crowing of Peter's cock." Finally she threw herself, heart and soul, into the mystical community governed by Jean de Labadie, and shared the vicissitudes of that queer little Quakerish society, which was driven from refuge to refuge, and gradually died out after the death of Labadie, which was shortly followed by her

own.

Scandal, as usual, was busy with her name, but she only said: "I thank God that He has given me a good name, that I may render it back to Him." She lost her friends, her scholar correspondents; all deserted her; but she had her reward. She "emerged upon the enchanted heights of mysticism." She has told the story in "Eukleria," the book in which she endeavored to depict her soul as she had formerly so assidu

ously portrayed her body; and Wieland, reading the book, recognized "the hand of a saint." Yet the "artist, scholar, saint," has been forgotten, except for a few essays by her countrymen, and Miss Birch has worked an almost virgin soil. How well she has built up her picture from "Eukleria" and the correspondence of Anna's contempora

The Athenaeum.

ries, of whom, and the town life of Holland, she introduces illuminating sketches, all who read her charming book will recognize. The ample bibliography shows that she has gone fully into the history of the period, but the qualities of sympathy and insight which distinguish her work are born, not made.

We all believe ourselves to be openminded, though it would puzzle us to explain exactly what significance we attach to the phrase. We have all an indefinite wish to be fair,--a hazy wish which can only find adequate expression in highfalutin ambiguity. Not long ago the newly appointed Mayor of a provincial town made a speech upon coming into office in which he declared his intention of doing his duty without fear or favor, "not leaning to partiality on the one hand, nor to impartiality upon the other." What the Mayor meant most men mean. Nevertheless, there are still bigots in plenty. The Atlantic Monthly for December contains a short article upon "The Open-Minded Bigot." An open-minded bigot! The phrase is paradoxical, yet it throws a light upon many types of character. Many men and women whom we cannot but regard as bigots surprise us by an occasional appearance of latitude. First of all there is the bigot who has a real sympathy with all other bigots. He is never hard upon any man who is what he calls consistent,- that is, who goes to lengths as absurd as his own, only in opposite directions. "It is always possible that I may be wrong," he will say in moments of what he cousiders inspired toleration; but in the face of that offchance the other bigot must be in the right. The only people who must, whatever happens, be

proved in error are the reasonable ones who agree with neither. It is easy enough to see the workings of his mind. All his prejudices take root in a sort of self-centred loyalty. So long as he never contradicts himself he believes he must arrive at truth which is synonymous with consistency. "Stick faithfully by your former expression and it will guide your future thought, and do not be frightened by apparent absurdities,"--that is his advice to the world. Logic, however, obliges him to admit that this plan leads different men in different directions. love even his enemies if they take his advice, and his dispassionate apprecia tion of their method of argument makes him seem quite open-minded. Some of his simple followers who do not realize that he is intolerant of reason will never allow him to be called a bigot at all.

But he can

Then there is a more subtle type of bigot, who has all the usual symptoms of an open mind, but is in reality the most relentless fanatic in the world, though he is almost never violent in argument. He has as a rule a deep inborn contempt for all views but his own, and for the men and women who hold them. Not only have they no intellectual right to their ideas, they have no moral right. They are deluded by their own self-interest-in the wrong In every sense of the word-in fact,

His

they are miscreants. On the other hand, he stops no one's mouth. firmest conviction is that if you give your adversary rope enough he will hang himself. There is often about this bigot a spurious appearance of sympathy. It does not bore him at all to hear the other side. He likes to hear its adherents uphold it. He likes to see how silly they are. Every word they speak confirms him in his opinion, and makes him more and more sure that they deserve the ruin to which they are running. The exercise of his faith is pleasurable to him. The only thing he can imagine which might shake it is to be debarred from the distraction of reading and listening to the nonsense put forward by the other side. Occasionally a far more genial bigot is confused with the one we have been describing. He is not contemptuous; he is forbearing. An open-minded manner becomes one who is in the full possession of truth. All forms of conscious opulence lend assurance, and calin irritability.

Of course a good many men might be described as open-minded bigots who are in reality not bigots at all. They are the men who would like to be bigots because they know where peace is to be found; but they cannot manage it, though by perpetual assertion they never cease to try. In reality they are doubters. Now and then they let a doubt show in the form of a concession. It is surprised out of them as a groan escapes a man well able to bear pain, a man whose capacity to pretend ease is often the finest thing about him. The doubter who lays down the law in self-defence is an idealist. He presses forward upon the road he thinks most likely to lead to Utopia, and he keeps assuring himself that he knows the way. Now and then he is struck with a horrible fear that he is on the wrong path. For a moment he thinks of turning back. Many wise men, he ad

mits, are going in the opposite direction. He hesitates, decides to go on, doubles his pace, and redoubles his asseverations.

Very often the most typical openminded bigots are to be found among men of a feminine turn of mind, a peculiarity by no means inconsistent with manliness. There are a few men of narrow intellectual power who have very wide sympathies where persons are concerned. One sees this phenomenon often among the very religious. they hold immovably to certain to the ordinary mind-entirely obsolete conclusions. In the abstract they condemn those who do not share them; in practice these convictions never interfere with their affections, nor with their correct judgment of character. Such men stand so firm in an unusual faith, with the world in error beneath them, that they are almost forced, if they have any love of humanity at all, into the attitude of grown-up people towards children. They look tenderly upon their errors, admire their talents, and are amused by their vagaries. Oddly enough, the relation is not seldom accepted from the other side, and they set a strange influence over minds which are stronger and better furnished than their own. Perhaps the aloofness created by what might be called their bigotry helps to this end, and they keep the consciences of those whose common-sense condemns them. If they like a man, they regard his erroneous views as the outcome of some slight and quite negligible mental or moral defect, or even of the excess of some virtue. They always have among their friends people whom they should by rights condemn, and who themselves wonder at the regard in which they hold them.

Where women are concerned the same thing is there in a more marked degree. The chief interest of most women is in persons. Very often in

dealing with women one must ask, not how much do their intellectual conclusions influence, but how little do they impede the working of their minds. Almost all good women have strong convictions, but they have not as a rule much power of intellectual endurance. They argue badly. They cannot stand the intellectual suspense which is necessary to the pursuit of knowledge. Such an endurance is the result of generations of training. On the other hand, their sympathies have been trained from the beginning. The burden of the young, the old, the sick, and the wayward they have learned to bear. They have shown genius in the criticism of life, a genius inspired by sympathy. The indulgence which comes not of indifference but of experience is the equivalent of an open mind. Among women the hard-hearted are the only true bigots, the only hopeless dunces.

A great many men and women who would have been bigots a long time ago --who are by nature bigots even now -may be truly said to-day to be openThe Spectator.

He

minded. Prejudice is the explanation of many men's silence upon burning topics. The silent man very often knows himself to be prejudiced. knows that certain points of view, while they may be reasonable, are to him repulsive. He is only at home in certain close atmospheres, and can only be fair on the instant-to persons of a certain type. He realizes, perhaps he exaggerates, his own want of catholicity. The spirit of the age tells him that he is all wrong, that he ought to think differently, that at least he must act as though he did. The result is a constant struggle, one that is productive of all sorts of good qualities—caution, justice, consideration. With such people there is a great gulf between friendship and acquaintance. They do not fritter away their affections; they have a true eye for the values of life. There is a type of open-minded bigot who should be the pride of our century. He is the proof of the extent to which modern training can transform the poison of fanaticism into the thin but wellflavored wine of fastidiousness.