Idleness and melancholy were his two great foes: he had no hostility to love. What reason was there to abstain from carefully cultivating a young girl’s capacity for loving, seeing that as a woman she would find in it her chief resource? To reject the thought of love, to avoid the very utterance of the word, and then, like Vivès, to rack your brains to create infinite derivatives, was, according to Dolce, a childish and an untrustworthy proceeding; it would be much better to face the ordeal frankly, and deaden its shocks beforehand by anointing oneself with the healing balm of platonic doctrine, by exhibiting, on the one hand, the body in its wretchedness, the vileness of earthly love, and on the other the beauty of love divine and pure. Women may fall through passion, but they can win salvation through sensibility, and therefore Dolce nourished them on the appropriate classics: Virgil, parts of Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Bembo, Sannazaro,[87] and, more especially, Castiglione. To his opponents, however, this system seemed over-venturesome; they reproached him with going half-way to meet danger, with putting into hands still weak the two-edged sword which so often wounds lustier hands. To this objection Dolce returned on behalf of the beautiful the same answer that Vivès made on behalf of the true. He was convinced that a liberal education was most surely calculated to form strong souls, citing in support of his contention Corinna and a thousand other old-world heroines rendered impeccable by culture, and, of his own time, the four daughters of queen Isabel, pupils of Vivès; all four, indeed, equally accomplished and yet equally unfortunate—but could anyone begrudge them their misfortunes?