therefore shall conclude by complimenting my own Taste in Characters,
when I assure you that I am,

_Your most affectionate Friend_, &c.




LETTER II.

To the SAME.


It gave me no small Pleasure to find, by your Answer to my last
Letter, that you now allow BEAUTY to be the Daughter of TRUTH; and I
in my turn will make a Concession to you, by confessing that BEAUTY
herself may have _acquired_ Charms, but then they are altogether such
as are consistent with her divine Extraction. What you observe is
very true, that the human Form (the most glorious Object, as you are
pleased to call it, in the Creation) let it be made with the most
accurate Symmetry and Proportion, may receive _additional_ Charms from
Education, and steal more subtily upon the Soul of the Beholder from
some adventitious Circumstances of easy Attitudes or Motion, and an
undefineable Sweetness of Countenance, which an habitual Commerce with
the more refined Part of Mankind superadds to the Work of Nature. This
the ancient _Grecian_ Artists would have represented mythologically
in Painting by the GRACES crowning VENUS. We find how much LELY has
availed himself in his shadowy Creations of transcribing from Life
this adventitious Charm into all his Portraits. I mean, when he
_stole_ upon his _animated Canvas_, as POPE poetically expresses it,