As to the ladies, there is one light in which perhaps they would not do amiss to view the practice of this art, besides that of mere diversion or improvement of their deportment: it is that of its being highly serviceable to their health, and to what it can never be expected they should be indifferent about, their beauty, it being the best and surest way of preserving, or even giving it to their whole person. It is in history a settled point, that beauty was no where more florishing, nor less rare, than among such people as encouraged and cultivated exercise, especially in the fair sex. The various provinces and governments in Greece, all agreed, some in a less, some in a greater degree, in making exercise a point of female education. The Spartans carried this to perhaps an excess, since the training of the children of that sex, hardly yielded to that of the male in laboriousness and fatigue. Be this confessed to be an extreme: but then it was in some measure compensated by its being universally allowed, that the Spartan women owed to it that beauty in which they excelled the rest of the Grecian women, who were themselves held, in that point, preferable to the rest of the world. Hellen was a Spartan. Yet the legislator of that people, did not so much as consider this advantage among the ends proposed in prescribing so hardy an education to the weaker sex. His views were for giving them that health and vigor of body, which might enable them to produce a race of men the fittest to serve their country in war. But as the best habit of body is ever inseparable from the greatest perfection of beauty, of which its possessor is susceptible, it very naturally followed, that the good plight to which exercise brought and preserved the females, gave also to their shape, that delicacy and suppleness, and to their every motion, that graceful agility which caracterized the Grecian beauties, and distinguished them for that nymph-stile of figure, which we to this day admire in the description of their historians, of their poets, or in the representations that yet remain to us in their statues, or other monuments of antiquity.