Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/209

 in the world. What a galaxy of feminine charms can be gathered under the word "British"! England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland offer all together such countless examples of woman's loveliness, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to give the prize for good looks to one portion of Britain more than to the other. America, so far as her samples have been, and are, seen in Europe, cannot outrival the "Old Country" in the prettiness of its women. But it is prettiness only; not Beauty. Beauty remains intrinsically where it was first born and first admitted into the annals of Art and Literature. Its home is still in "the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung."

Nothing that was ever created in the way of female loveliness can surpass the beauty of a beautiful Greek woman. True, she is as rare as a butterfly in a snow storm. True, the women of Athens and of Greece generally, taken in the rough majority, are not on an average, even pretty. Nevertheless the palm of beauty remains with them—because there are always two,—or may be three of them, who dawn year by year upon the world in all the old perfection of the classic models, and who may truly be taken for newly-descended goddesses, so faultlessly formed, so exquisitely featured are they. They are not famed by the paragraphist, and they probably will never get the chance of moving in the circles of the British "Upper Ten" or the American "Four Hundred." But they are the daughters of Aphrodite still, and hold fast their heavenly mother's attributes. It is easy to find a hundred or more pretty British and American women for one beautiful Greek—but when found, the beautiful Greek eclipses