LENIO. 'Already I almost guess, worthy and discreet company, how even now in your understanding you are judging me as bold and rash, since with the little intellect and less experience which the rustic life, in which I have been nurtured for some time, can promise, I am willing to hold a contest in a matter so difficult as this with the famous Thyrsis, whose nurture in famous academies, and whose profound studies, can assure naught to my pretensions save certain failure. But confident that at times the force of natural genius, adorned with some little experience, is wont to discover new paths with which one makes easy sciences acquired during long years, I wish to make bold to-day to show in public the reasons which have moved me to be such an enemy to love, that I had deserved thereby to gain the appellation of loveless; and though nothing else would have moved me to do this, save your behest, I would not excuse myself from doing it; all the more that the glory will not be slight which I have to gain hereby, though I should lose in the enterprise, since after all fame will say that I had the spirit to compete with the renowned Thyrsis. And so on this understanding, without wishing to be favoured except by the reason that I have on my side, it alone do I invoke and pray to give such strength to my words and arguments that there may appear in both of them the reason I have for being such an enemy to love as I proclaim. Love, then, as I have heard my elders say, is a desire for beauty; and this definition, amongst many others, those give it that have advanced farthest in this question. Then, if it be granted me, that love is desire for beauty, it must necessarily be granted me that such as is the beauty which is loved, will be the love with which it is loved. And because beauty is of two kinds, corporeal and incorporeal, the love which loves corporeal beauty for its ultimate goal, such a love as this cannot be good, and this is the love whose enemy I am; but as corporeal beauty is divided likewise into two parts, namely into living bodies and dead bodies, there can also be a love of corporeal beauty which may be good. The one part of corporeal beauty is shown in living bodies of men and women, and this consists in all the parts of the body being good in themselves, and all together making one perfect whole, and forming a body proportioned in limbs and in pleasantness of hue. The other beauty of the corporeal part which is not alive, consists in pictures, statues and buildings; which beauty can be loved without the love with which it is loved being blameworthy. Incorporeal beauty is divided also into two parts, the virtues and the sciences of the soul; and the love which cleaves to virtue must necessarily be good, and likewise that which cleaves to virtuous sciences and agreeable studies. Then, as these two kinds of beauty are the cause which begets love in our breasts, it follows that whether love be good or bad, depends upon