[In the excerpt below, an anonymous reviewer briefly describes a number of Agrippa's writings, portraying him as a misunderstood and tragic figure.]

[Agrippa's On the Nobleness and Superiority of the Female Sex] is a very learned but exaggerated assertion of the superiority of women to men; every weakness—physical, mental, moral—being exalted into a merit. One can scarcely conceive such a production to be the serious accomplishment of a serious mind, its extravagant perversion of fact and argument so much resembling that grave banter which is the most pungent ridicule. Some of the items are amusing: —

It is because she is made of purer matter that a woman, from whatever height she may look down, never turns giddy, and her eyes never have a mist before them, like the eyes of men.

Even after death nature respects her inherent modesty, for a drowned woman floats on her face, and a drowned man upon his back.

The noblest part of a human being is the head; but the man's head is liable to baldness,—woman is never bald.

The man's face often is made so filthy with a most odious beard, and so covered with sordid hairs, that it is scarcely to be distinguished from the face of a wild beast; in women, on the other hand, the face always remains pure and decent.

The gift of speech is the most excellent of human faculties. Man receives this gift from woman, from his mother or his nurse; and it is a gift bestowed upon woman herself with such liberality that the world has scarcely seen a woman who was mute. Aristotle may say that of all animals the males are stronger and wiser than the females, but St. Paul writes that 'weak things have been chosen to confound the strong.' Adam was sublimely endowed, but woman humbled him; Samson was strong, but woman made him captive; Lot was chaste, but woman seduced him; David was religious, but woman disturbed his piety; Solomon was wise, but woman deceived him; Job was patient, and was robbed by the devil of fortune and family; ulcerated, grieved, and oppressed, nothing provoked him to anger till a woman did it, therein proving herself stronger than the devil.

Was ever orator so good or so successful that a courtezan could not excel his powers of persuasion? What arithmetician by false calculation would know how to cheat a woman in the payment of a debt? What musician equals her in song and amenity of voice? Does not the old nurse very often beat the doctor?

When Cornelius compounded all these truths and trash, it ought to be told that he was in love with a certain choice sample of womanhood, a young Switzer, and that she probably sat before his imagination while he sketched his portrait of female perfection. Love coloured the picture which talent at the bidding of ambition drew. It is some satisfaction to know that the young doctor of divinity gained a good wife in consequence of his lucubration, one Jane Louisa Tyssie, of Geneva, although he failed in his more remote object, that of securing such exalted patronage as was to moor the barque of his fortunes in the haven of prosperity….

His treatise on the Vanity of Sciences, a kind of slur on all knowledge and professions, a recantation of his own whole life, and a misanthropic satire on men and their manners, made its appearance [around 1530]. It clenched his ruin. Indiscriminate in its reprobation of pretension, folly, and wrong, it made enemies in all professions and quarters. With the courts of princes, the colleges of professors, the cloisters of cenobites, he made especially free, and this, coupled with the progress of the Reformation in Germany at large, sealed his doom. His princess-patron was also just dead, whose decease he bemoaned in a graceful and learned eulogy, so that he had no one to interpose between himself and imperial neglect or sacerdotal vengeance. His book of occult sciences, De Philosophiâ Occultâ, circulated widely in MS., now first saw the light: the composition, in its crude form, of a youth, the accumulation of all the intervening years, and in any case rather a summary of the opinions held upon the subject than a profession of his own belief. Of this hear his own words: —

I confess that there are very many vain things and curious prodigies taught for the sake of ostentation in books of magic; cast them aside as emptiness, but do not refuse to know their causes. Where I err, or have too freely spoken, pardon my youth, for I was less than a youth when I composed this work, so that I might excuse myself, and say, 'When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I had knowledge as a child; but now that I am a man, I have put away from me childish things;' and a great part truly of what is in this book, I have retracted in my book upon the Vanity and Uncertainty of Sciences.

Why print this, then? Simply because others would print spurious copies of the work, to the great injury of his reputation and finances, if he did not anticipate their peculation; to which we may add, a paternal affection, perhaps, for the first-born of his thoughts. But though he thus studiously claimed for his publication the character of a curious compilation, in which he indulged only that half-belief which is the mongrel offspring of scepticism and science, the work afforded a handle for malignity to compass his detraction, and a ground, however false, for denouncing him as a wizard, conjuror, and whatever is most opposed to sana fides et mores sani. The soft and feminine side of his character, his love for dogs, was enlisted in the cause of his detractors, and his canine pets, of which he cherished almost a kennel—Monsieur, Mademoiselle, Tarot, Franza, Musa, Ciccone, Balassa—were represented as so many familiars of the magician. One was especially the agent of the devil, a black pug, which used to lie on his table, and crouching among his papers. Now if this simple fact were sufficient to condemn our learned knight, we reviewers can scarcely hope to escape like reprobation, for it is both our wont and delight to write at a large table, whereon our little Fritz protendeth himself at full length, pouring the inspiration of his love and wonder into our soul as our pen travels along the paper, out of his most expressive brown eyes. To revert to Agrippa; give a dog a bad name, and you may hang him. While the best, the most learned, independent, and generous souls were on his side, the sycophants, the sneaks, the snobs, and the snakes—a large class, who both hiss loudly and sting fatally—were against him. He is poor—he can possess no merit, said the courtiers; he does not believe in the infallibility of the church, the impeccability of divines, the impecuniosity of monks—he is the devil, said the priests. And these two large classes carried the greater part of the world with them; and the struggling scholar, the softhearted householder, the ingenious interrogator and interpreter of nature, the gentle soldier, who filled with love every creature on whom his shadow fell, down to the very brutes who revered in him the image of God, sunk beneath universal prejudice….