1549), who became a
rich man by his lessons, and published a handbook to the practice of
the lute.
At a time when there was no opera to concentrate and monopolize musical
talent, this general cultivation of the art must have been something
wonderfully varied, intelligent, and original. It is another question
how much we should find to satisfy us in these forms of music, could
they now be reproduced for us.
Equality of Men and Women
To understand the higher forms of social intercourse at this period, we
must keep before our minds the fact that women stood on a footing of
perfect equality with men. We must not suffer ourselves to be misled by
the sophistical and often malicious talk about the assumed inferiority
of the female sex, which we meet with now and then in the dialogues of
this time, nor by such satires as the third of Ariosto, who treats
woman as a dangerous grown-up child, whom a man must learn how to
manage, in spite of the great gulf between them. There is, indeed, a
certain amount of truth in what he says. Just because the educated
woman was on a level with the man, that communion of mind and heart
which comes from the sense of mutual dependance and completion, could
not be developed in marriage at this time, as it has been developed
later in the cultivated society of the North.
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