"Beauty," remarks a philosophic panegyrist of physical perfection, "extends its prestige to posterity itself, and attaches a charm for centuries to the name alone of the privileged creatures upon whom it has pleased heaven to bestow it." Beauty has also its epochs. It does not belong to all men and to all ages to enjoy it in its exquisite perfection. As there are fashions which spoil it, so there are periods which affect its sentiment. For instance, it belonged to the eighteenth century to invent _pretty_ women--charming dolls--all powder, patches, and perfume, affecting the attractions which they did not possess under their vast hoops and great furbelows. Let us venture to say that the foundation of true beauty, as of true virtue, as of true genius, is strength. Shed over this strength the vivifying rays of elegance, grace, delicacy, and you have beauty. Its perfect type is the Venus of Milo,[3] or again, that pure and mysterious apparition, goddess or mortal, which is called Psyche, or the Venus of Naples.[4] Beauty is certainly to be seen in the Venus de' Medici, but in that type we feel that it is declining, or about to decline. Look at, not the women of Titian, but the virgins of Raphael and Leonardo: the face is of infinite delicacy, but the body evinces strength. These forms ought to disgust one for ever with the shadows and monkeys _a la Pompadour_. Let us adore grace, but not separate it in everything too much from strength, for without strength grace soon shares the fate of the flower that is separated from the stem which vitalizes and sustains it. [3] Quatremere de Quincy, Dissertation upon the Antique Statue of Venus Discovered in the Island of Milo. 1836. [4] Millingen: Ancient Inedited Monuments. Fol. 1826. What a train of accomplished women this seventeenth century presents to us! They were not all politicians. Women who were loaded with admiration, drawing after them all hearts, and spreading from rank to rank that worship of beauty which throughout Europe received the name of French gallantry. In France they accompany this great century in its too rapid course; they mark its principal epochs, beginning with Charlotte de Montmorency and ending with Mdme. de Montespan. The Duchess de Longueville has perhaps the most prominent place in that dazzling gallery of lovely women, having all the characteristics of true beauty, and joining to it a charm exclusively her own. In early girlhood she had been taken, along with her elder brother, the Duke d'Enghien, to the Hotel de Rambouillet; and the _salons_ of the Rue St. Thomas du Louvre were probably the most fitting school for such a mind as hers, in which grandeur and finesse were almost equally blended--a grandeur allied to the romantic, and associated with a finesse frequently merging into subtilty, as indeed may be discerned in Corneille himself, the most perfect mental representative of that period.