things giving delight and pleasure, as the living corporeal beauties of which you, Lenio, spoke. And each form of these loves of which I have spoken ought not to be blamed by any tongue, for the chaste love ever was, is and must be spotless, simple, pure and divine, finding rest and repose in God alone. Profitable love, being, as it is, natural, ought not to be condemned, still less the delectable, for it is more natural than the profitable. That these two forms of love are natural in us, experience shows us, for as soon as our daring first parent transgressed the divine commandment, and from lord was made a servant, and from freeman a slave, straightway he knew the misery into which he had fallen, and the poverty in which he was. And so he at once took the leaves of trees to cover him, and sweated and toiled, breaking the earth to sustain himself, and to live with the least discomfort possible; and thereafter, obeying his God therein better than in aught else, he sought to have children, and in them to perpetuate and delight the human race. And as by his disobedience death entered into him, and through him into all his descendants, so we inherit at the same time all his affections and passions, as we inherit his very nature; and as he sought to remedy his necessity and poverty, so we cannot fail to seek and desire to remedy ours. And hence springs the love we have for things useful to human life; and the more we gain of them, the more it seems to us we remedy our want. And by the same reasoning we inherit the desire of perpetuating ourselves in our children; and from this desire follows that, which we have, to enjoy living corporeal beauty, as the only true means which lead such desires to a happy end. So that this delectable love, alone and without mixture of any other accident, is worthy rather of praise than of blame. And this is the love, which you, Lenio, hold for enemy; and the cause is that you do not understand it, nor know it, for you have never seen it alone, and in its own shape, but always accompanied by pernicious, lascivious and ill-placed desires. And this is not the fault of love, which is always good, but of the accidents which come to it; as we see happening in some copious stream, that has its birth from some clear and limpid spring, which is ever supplying to it clear cool waters, and a little while after it leaves its stainless mother, its sweet and crystalline waters are changed to bitter and turbid, by reason of the many stained brooks, which join it on either side. Hence this first motion, love or desire as you would call it, cannot arise except from a good beginning; and truly among good beginnings is the knowledge of beauty, which, once recognised as such, it seems well-nigh impossible to avoid loving. And beauty has such power to move our minds, that it alone caused the ancient philosophers (blind and without the light of faith to guide them), led by natural reason, and attracted by the beauty they beheld