Bathus, in the Tenth Idyllium of Theocritus, exclaims:-- “Charming Bombyce, you my numbers greet, How lovely, fair, and beautiful your feet!” While Paris in making choice of the many beautiful virgins brought before him, pays particular attention to their pedal attractions:-- “Their gait he marked as gracefully they moved, And round their feet his eye sagacious roved.” Ben Jonson describes a lover whose affection for his mistress was so great that he-- ----“would adore the shoe, And slipper was left off, and kiss it too.” and again-- “And where she went the flowers took thickest root, As she had sowed them with her odorous foot.” Butler, too, has the same springing up of flowers in his “Hudibras”:-- “Where’er you tread, your foot shall set The primrose and the violet.” In an anonymous volume of poems printed in 1653, the writer being contemporary with Butler, we find the following beautiful sentiment:-- “How her feet tempt; how soft and light she treads, Fearing to wake the flowers from their beds: Yet from their sweet green pillows everywhere They start and gaze about to see my fair. * * * * * Look how that pretty modest columbine Hangs down its head to view those feet of thine! See the fond motion of the strawberrie Creeping on earth we go along with thee; The lovely violet makes after too, Unwilling yet, my dear, to part with you. The knot-grass and the daisies catch thy toes To kisse my faire one’s feet before she goes.” Shakspere, in “Troilus and Cressida,” describes Diomede walking:-- “‘Tis he, I ken the manner of his gait; He rises on the toe; that spirit of his, In aspiration lifts him from the earth!” Again:-- “Shore’s wife hath a pretty foot;” and his graphic description of a free-natured woman-- ----“nay, her foot speaks.” Old Herrick, who seems to have had the finest perception of the delicate and charming, thus compliments Mrs. Susanna Southwood:-- “Her pretty feet, Like smiles, did creep A little out, and then, As if they started at bo peep, Did soon draw in again.” It is the exquisite intimation of the lively character of the inward spirit, shown in the active movements of the feet, which Sir John Suckling has imitated in his ballad of the Wedding:-- “Her feet beneath her petticoat Like little mice stole in and out, As if they feared the light; But oh, she dances such a way, No sun upon an Easter day Is half so fine a sight!” Very beautiful also is the following, from one of our old poets. The words are given entire, in Wilson’s “Cheerful Ayres for three Voices.” Who could do any harm to so beautiful a part of the human frame? “Doe not feare to put thy feet Naked in the river sweet; Think not newt, nor leech, nor toade, Will bite thy foot where thou hast trode.”