e Maintenon
_After the painting by John Gilbert_.

John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough
_After the painting by Pieter van der Werff, Pitti Palace, Florence_.

Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough
_After the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller_.

Mme. de Recamier
_After the painting by Mlle. Morin_

Madame de Stael
_After the painting by Mlle. de Godefroid, Versailles_.

Garrick and His Wife
_After the painting by William Hogarth_.

Hannah More
_After the painting by H.W. Pickersgill, A.R.A._.

BEACON LIGHTS OF HISTORY

HELOISE.

* * * * *

A.D. 1101-1164.

LOVE.

When Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise, they yet found one
flower, wherever they wandered, blooming in perpetual beauty. This
flower represents a great certitude, without which few would be
happy,--subtile, mysterious, inexplicable,--a great boon recognized
alike by poets and moralists, Pagan and Christian; yea, identified not
only with happiness, but human existence, and pertaining to the soul in
its highest aspirations. Allied with the transient and the mortal, even
with the weak and corrupt, it is yet immortal in its nature and lofty in
its aims,--at once a passion, a sentiment, and an inspiration.

To attempt to describe woman without this element of our complex nature,
which constitutes her peculiar fascination, is like trying to act the
tragedy of Hamlet without Hamlet himself,--an absurdity; a picture
without a central figure, a novel without a heroine, a religion without
a sacrifice. My subject is not without its difficulties. The passion or
sentiment I describe is degrading when perverted, as it is exalting when
pure. Yet it is not vice I would paint, but virtue; not weakness, but
strength; not the transient, but the permanent; not the mortal, but the
immortal,--all that is ennobling in the aspiring soul.

"Socrates," says Legouve, "who caught glimpses of everything that he did
not clearly define, uttered one day to his disciples these beautiful
words: 'There are two Venuses: one celestial, called Urania, the
heavenly, who presides over all pure and spiritual affections; and the
other Polyhymnia, the terrestrial, who excites sensual and gross
desires.'" The history of love is the eternal struggle between these two
divinities,--the one seeking to elevate and the other to degrade. Plato,
for the first time, in his beautiful hymn to the Venus Urania, displayed
to men the unknown image of love,--the e