_Leontion._ I used none whatever. _Epicurus._ That white arm was then, as it is now, over the shoulder of Ternissa; and her breath imparted a fresh bloom to your cheek, a new music to your voice. No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman. In youth you love one above the others of your sex; in riper age you hate all, more or less, in proportion to similarity of accomplishments and pursuits--which sometimes (I wish it were oftener) are bonds of union to man. In us you more easily pardon faults than excellences in each other. _Your_ tempers are such, my beloved scholars, that even this truth does not ruffle them; and such is your affection, that I look with confidence to its unabated ardour at twenty. _Leontion._ Oh, then I am to love Ternissa almost fifteen months! _Ternissa._ And I am destined to survive the loss of it three months above four years! _Epicurus._ Incomparable creatures! may it be eternal! In loving ye shall follow no example; ye shall step securely over the iron rule laid down for others by the Destinies, and _you_ for ever be Leontion, and _you_ Ternissa. _Leontion._ Then indeed we should not want statues. _Ternissa._ But men, who are vainer creatures, would be good for nothing without them: they must be flattered even by the stones. _Epicurus._ Very true. Neither the higher arts nor the civic virtues can flourish extensively without the statues of illustrious men. But gardens are not the places for them. Sparrows, wooing on the general's truncheon (unless he be such a general as one of ours in the last war), and snails besliming the emblems of the poet, do not remind us worthily of their characters. Porticos are their proper situations, and those the most frequented. Even there they may lose all honour and distinction, whether from the thoughtlessness of magistrates or from the malignity of rivals. Our own city, the least exposed of any to the effects of either, presents us a disheartening example. When the Thebans in their jealousy condemned Pindar to the payment of a fine for having praised the Athenians too highly, our citizens erected a statue of bronze to him. _Leontion._ Jealousy of Athens made the Thebans fine him; and jealousy of Thebes made the Athenians thus record it. _Epicurus._ And jealousy of Pindar, I suspect, made some poet persuade the archons to render the distinction a vile and worthless one, by placing his effigy near a king's--one Evagoras of Cyprus. _Ternissa._ Evagoras, I think I remember to have read in the inscription, was rewarded in this manner for his reception of Conon, defeated by the Lacedemonians.