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 purest in the life of a nun, and brightest in the death of a martyr. It is scarcely possible to overrate the influence of the conceptions formed of her, in ennobling the sentiments of Christian women of the higher orders;—to their practical common sense, as the mistresses of a household or a nation, her example may have been less conducive.

III. St. Barbara, also an Egyptian, and St. Catharine's contemporary, though the most practical of the mythic saints, is also, after St. Sophia, the least corporeal: she vanishes far away into the 'Inclusa Danae,' and her "Turris aenea" becomes a myth of Christian safety, of which the Scriptural significance may be enough felt by merely looking out the texts under the word "Tower," in your concordance; and whose effectual power, in the fortitudes alike of matter and spirit, was in all probability made impressive enough to all Christendom, both by the fortifications and persecutions of Diocletian. I have endeavoured to mark her general relations to St. Sophia in the little imaginary dialogue between them, given in the eighth lecture of the 'Ethics of the Dust.'

Afterwards, as Gothic architecture becomes dominant, and at last beyond question the most wonderful of all temple-building, St. Barbara's Tower is, of course, its perfected symbol and utmost achievement; and whether in the coronets of countless battlements worn on the brows of the noblest cities, or in the