I. 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.
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. Genevieve of
the East; t