inferiority ended. He was so far from believing her to be morally below himself that the whole of his religious life was summed up in the honouring of God and of women! Side by side with a purity of life that amazed the civilised races they conquered, the barbarians developed a faith in women which made them look upon every wife and maiden and mother as a possible priestess. They had their women near them when they went into battle, and they brought them into the camp in order to gain courage from them in the hour of defeat. Moreover, women were the scholars or "clerks" of that age and race. The men, busy with the arts of war, had no time to read the runes, or to learn writing, and so in the old traditions and pictures it is nearly always a woman who teaches or reads, and it is the women who inherit legacies of books, just as the men inherit the arms and weapons of their dead ancestors. Encouraged to learn, believed to possess mysterious powers to influence men for good or evil, these women of the barbarous tribes of the North lived in an atmosphere of reverence, and possessed privileges that astounded the civilised foreigner! "Durch aller froen ère—Rret Got and diû wif"—In old German, in old Saxon the same axiom is found—the axiom that enjoins man to honour woman, not merely as wife, or mother, but simply as woman.
This simple, strong, and healthy feeling, born in the wild forest, in the pure breezes and rains of the open, was the foundation of the chivalry of later ages. A fine subsoil it was, and even to-day, after so many centuries, and after so much that is dark and
