and virtuous woman?--you have read it a dozen times.

_Ly_. Yes; and every time I read it, it is as if she stood
before me. I almost hear her uttering the words the historian has
put into her mouth, and see her arming her husband and sending him
forth to battle.

_Poly_. Ah, my dear Lycinus, _this_ lady has passed you
but once, like a lightning flash; and your praises, I perceive, are
all for those external charms that strike the eye. You are yet a
stranger to her nobility of soul; you know not that higher, more
god-like beauty. _I_ am her fellow-countryman, I know her, and
have conversed with her many times. You are aware that gentleness,
humanity, magnanimity, modesty, culture, are things that I prize
more than beauty-and rightly; to do otherwise would be as absurd as
to value raiment above the body. Where physical perfection goes
hand-in-hand with spiritual excellence, there alone (as I maintain)
is true beauty. I could show you many a woman whose outward
loveliness is marred by what is within; who has but to open her
lips, and beauty stands confessed a faded, withered thing, the
mean, unlovely handmaid of that odious mistress, her soul. Such
women are like Egyptian temples: the shrine is fair and stately,
wrought of costly marble, decked out with gilding and painting: but
seek the God within, and you find an ape--an ibis--a goat--a cat.
Of how many women is the same thing true! Beauty unadorned is not
enough: and her true adornments are not purple and jewels, but
those others that I have mentioned, modesty, courtesy, humanity,
virtue and all that waits on virtue.

_Ly_. Why then, Polystratus, you shall give me story for story,