Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/18

10 Does it need this anecdote to vindicate the power of personal charms, "the proud strength of beauty," as an old writer fitly expresses it? We could relate a hundred others to the same effect. There is Coleridge, the most brilliant talker of this century, who somewhere complains with comical chagrin how often, as in some ballroom he held a circle of listeners spellbound by his wondrous discourse, he had seen his hearers slip away one by one when the belle of the evening appeared. It was so in all times. Phryne, the most beautiful woman of Athens in the days of Phidias and Praxiteles, had a cause of importance to try before the court. Lest her peerless charms should deflect the scales of justice, she was ordered to appear veiled. But when she found the judges were about to pronounce against her, she threw aside her drapery, and so biased their minds by the sight of her beauty that straightway they decided in her favor.

Would Judith, think you, have saved her country and won a fame imperishable, had she not been as comely a Jewish maiden as ever crushed with white feet the purple grapes of Olivet?

This is true that the poet sings—

"Plus oblige, et peut davantage, Un beau visage, Qu'un homme armé."

As nothing is more powerful, so few things are more noble than personal beauty. It is a shallow