Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

JOHN KNOX
to you in declaration of my remembrance of you.
True it is that I have many whom I bear in equal
remembrance before God with you, to whom at
present I write nothing, either for that I esteem
them stronger than you, and therefore they need the
less my rude labours, or else because they have not
provoked me by their writing to recompense their
remembrance. '1 His 'sisters in Edinburgh' had
evidently to 'provoke' his attention pretty con-
stantly ; nearly all his letters are, on the face of
them, answers to questions, and the answers are
given with a certain crudity that I do not find
repeated when he writes to those he really cares
for. So when they consult him about women's
apparel (a subject on which his opinion may be
pretty correctly imagined by the ingenious reader
for himself), he takes occasion to anticipate some of
the most offensive matter of the ' First Blast ' in a
style of real brutality.^ It is not merely that he
tells them ' the garments of women do declare their
weakness and inability to execute the office of man,'
though that in itself is neither very wise nor very
opportune in such a correspondence, one would
think; but if the reader will take the trouble to
wade through the long, tedious sermon for himself,
he will see proof enough that Knox neither loved,
nor very deeply respected, the women he was then
addressing. In very truth, I believe these Edin-
burgh sisters simply bored him. He had a certain
interest in them as his children in the Lord ; they
1 Works, iv. 246. 2 jjj^ jy^ 225.
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