Let us complete our portrait of Vivès, and at the same time that of many a young woman of the new generation, by adding that he by no means looked down on the practical knowledge of plain cooking, of domestic economy or the common medicines. It might be thought that he had no ardour but for the Bible, and there is no lack of ill-natured jesters who cast a stone at his Latinist ladies;[85] whereas, on the contrary, he spoke up for the kitchen, though to the detriment of dress and dolls. “What,” he cries, “is not a hand smutted with coal as good as a snow-white hand that is open to everyone?” It only needs a father or mother to fall ill, and he is perfectly happy, for then you will see his fair Latinist in neat white apron, bringing a cooling draught she herself has mixed, and bestowing one of those smiles for which one would gratefully gulp down a whole druggist’s shop. Here, according to him, is the distinguishing mark of his system; a practically useful intelligence, and a physical as well as moral devotion. The Italian school drew its inspiration much more directly from the need of the ideal; it rejected passion as full of peril and made mere sensibility its goal. But it too pretended to take its stand on conceptions of absolute truth, though more elementary ones; and these it did not represent as intellectual acquirements, because it regarded, not knowledge, but feeling and judgment, as the end a woman ought to set before her. The education dear to this school was above all an education of impressions and enthusiasm, in which scientific truth only came in to supply ballast and to prevent an exaggerated serenity, or an over-confidence in life. In its refinement and elegance this school preserved as it were an after perfume from the noble city of Rome, where fastidious and ceremonious prelates, gourmets but not cooks, let money flow into their pockets through immense spiritual aqueducts, and set about pouring it away again in perfect cascades of ostentation. Hands smutty with coal indeed! A lazzarone would blush at the thought! There are none but princesses in Italy. Dolce, a supreme example of the Italian, took, for the formation of an Italian woman, the recognised elements: chastity, modesty, reserve, composure, and a regular study (this was to be particularly free, with no expurgation) of the classics and the church fathers;[86] and from all this he would fashion for you the sweetest creature imaginable.