We find, on investigation, what these considerations would lead us to
expect, that eminent women have commonly been more exceptional in their
training and position than even in their genius. They have excelled the
average of their own sex because they have had more of the ordinary
advantages of the other sex. Take any department of learning or skill;
take, for instance, the knowledge of languages, the universal alphabet,
philology.--On the great stairway, at Padua, stands the statue of Elena
Cornaro, professor of six languages in that once renowned university.
But Elena Cornaro was educated like a boy, by her father. On the great
door of the University of Bologna is inscribed the epitaph of Clotilda
Tambroni, the honored correspondent of Person, and the first Greek
scholar of Southern Europe in her day. But Clotilda Tambroni was
educated like a boy, by Emanuele Aponte.--How fine are those prefatory
words, "by a Right Reverend Prelate," to that pioneer book in
Anglo-Saxon lore, Elizabeth Elstob's grammar: "Our earthly possessions
are indeed our patrimony, as derived to us by the industry of our
fathers; but the language in which we speak is our mother-tongue, and
who so proper to play the critic in this as the females?" But this
particular female obtained the rudiments of her rare education from her
mother, before she was eight years old, in spite of much opposition from
her right reverend guardians.--Adelung, the highest authority, declares
that all modern philology is founded on the translation of a Russian
vocabulary into two hundred different dialects by Catherine II.
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