times go on; her healthy influence being perhaps greater over sweet
vicars' daughters in Wakefield--when Wakefield _was_,--than over the
prudentest of the rarely prudent Empresses of Byzantium.

II. Of St. Catharine of Egypt there are vestiges of personal tradition
which may perhaps permit the supposition of her having really once
existed, as a very lovely, witty, proud, and 'fanciful' girl. She
afterwards becomes the Christian type of the Bride, in the 'Song of
Solomon,' involved with an ideal of all that is purest in the life of
a nun, and brightest in the death of a martyr. It is scarcely possible
to overrate the influence of the conceptions formed of her, in
ennobling the sentiments of Christian women of the higher orders;--to
their practical common sense, as the mistresses of a household or a
nation, her example may have been less conducive.

III. St. Barbara, also an Egyptian, and St. Catharine's contemporary,
though the most practical of the mythic saints, is also, after St.
Sophia, the least corporeal: she vanishes far away into the 'Inclusa
Danae,' and her "Tunis aenea" becomes a myth of Christian safety, of
which the Scriptural significance may be enough felt by merely looking
out the texts under the word "Tower," in your concordance; and whose
effectual power, in the fortitudes alike of matter and spirit, was in
all probability made impressive enough to all Christendom, both by
the fortifications and persecutions of Diocletian. I have endeavoured
to mark her general relations to St. Sophia in the little imaginary
dialogue between them, given in the eighth lecture of the 'Ethics of
the Dust.'

Afterwards, as Gothic architecture becomes dominant, and at last
beyond question the most wonderful of all temple-building, St.