Conversation was not merely a pleasure. If they strove earnestly after the Beautiful, it was because the reign of beauty is the most effectual assurance of the reign of truth and goodness. Does anyone imagine that a woman can shut herself in her drawing-room, and that all she need do is to show herself beautiful, amiable, sweet, intelligent, tender to the men worthy of forming her circle? No one thinks so. Woman rules because she redeems. To direct or actively to engage in works of charity, to send money to the wretched, without looking out of doors to see what men are actually suffering or dying—this would be the absolute negation of the social aim of conversation. Through conversation a woman comes into living touch with realities. She must show herself as real flesh and blood to the wretched; she owes them her smile, her beauty and her grace; aye, it is her bounden duty to be beautiful, amiable, gentle, intelligent, tender for the sake of those whose lot is solaced by no ray from heaven. She must welcome the poor and lowly, and though she may not be able to speak to them in Plato’s language, she must none the less tend them with the supreme medicine of the Beautiful, enter into their interests and their troubles, talk with them, shower on them her manna of hope and patience, and—if she have it—light. Perhaps we shall now be asked how many women attained to these altitudes in the apostleship of beauty, and if we can cite many who attempted to put their ideas into practice. Assuredly, we can. In spite of the somewhat too artistic cast into which social intercourse was thrown by platonism, more than one woman found in her own heart a commentary which neither Ficino nor Bembo ever knew. In France we may mention Anne of France as one who was thoroughly convinced that conversation was a duty to society at large. In Italy, ladies of the highest rank, like Isabella d’Este and Vittoria Colonna, slightly intoxicated with Beauty, consorted almost exclusively with princes and prelates and men of culture, and in this regard the Renaissance is perhaps rightly accused of over-refinement; yet they possessed in a rare degree the talent of diffusing around them an atmosphere of sweetness. At Urbino, a provincial court of no little exclusiveness, even the stalls of the handicraftsmen were lapped in a delicious air; Raphael grew up like a natural plant; a thousand trivial incidents in the life of the place give us glimpses of grace and amiability. The influence was indirect, but very powerful. CORRESPONDENCE.