Barbara's Tower is, of course, its perfected symbol and utmost
achievement; and whether in the coronets of countless battlements worn
on the brows of the noblest cities, or in the Lombard bell-tower on
the mountains, and the English spire on Sarum plain, the geometric
majesty of the Egyptian maid became glorious in harmony of defence,
and sacred with precision of symbol.

As the buildings which showed her utmost skill were chiefly exposed
to lightning, she is invoked in defence from it; and our petition
in the Litany, against sudden death, was written originally to her.
The blasphemous corruptions of her into a patroness of cannon and
gunpowder, are among the most ludicrous, (because precisely contrary
to the original tradition,) as well as the most deadly, insolences and
stupidities of Renaissance Art.

IV. St. Margaret of Antioch was a shepherdess; the St. Geneviève of
the East; the type of feminine gentleness and simplicity. Traditions
of the resurrection of Alcestis perhaps mingle in those of her contest
with the dragon; but at all events, she differs from the other three
great mythic saints, in expressing the soul's victory over temptation
or affliction, by Christ's miraculous help, and without any special
power of its own. She is the saint of the meek and of the poor; her
virtue and her victory are those of all gracious and lowly womanhood;
and her memory is consecrated among the gentle households of Europe;
no other name, except those of Jeanne and Jeanie, seems so gifted with
a baptismal fairy power of giving grace and peace.

I must be forgiven for thinking, even on this canonical ground,
not only of Jeanie Deans, and Margaret of Branksome; but of
Meg--Merrilies. My readers will, I fear, choose rather to think of the