solute; but as regards their own personal
character, it was only because you could not have followed me so
easily, that I did not take the Greek women instead of Shakespeare's;
and instance, for chief ideal types of human beauty and faith, the
simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; the divine, yet
rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful kindness and simple
princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the housewifely calm of that of
Penelope, with its watch upon the sea; the ever patient, fearless,
hopelessly devoted piety of the sister and daughter, in Antigone; the
bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent; and, finally, the
expectation of the resurrection, made clear to the soul of the Greeks
in the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, to save her
husband, had passed calmly through the bitterness of death.

62. Now, I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind upon you
if I had time. I would take Chaucer, and show you why he wrote a
Legend of Good Women; but no Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser,
and show you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and
sometimes vanquished; but the soul of Una is never darkened, and the
spear of Britomart is never broken. Nay, I could go back into the
mythical teaching of the most ancient times, and show you how the great
people,--by one of whose princesses it was appointed that the Lawgiver
of all the earth should be educated, rather than by his own
kindred;--how that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, gave
to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a woman; and into her hand, for a
symbol, the weaver's shuttle; and how the name and the form of that
spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks, became that Athena
of the olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to faith in whom you owe, down to
this date, whatever you hold most precious in art, in literature, or in
types of national virtue.

63. But I will not wander into this distant and mythical element; I
will only ask you to give its legitimate value to the testimony of
these great poets and men of the world,--consistent, as you see it is,
on this head. I will ask you whether it can be supposed that these
men, in the main work of their lives, are amusing themselves with a
fictitious and idle view of the relations between man and woman;--nay,
worse than fictitious or idle; for a thing may be imaginary, yet
desirable, if it were possible; but this, their ideal of woman, is,
according to o