Those who use this proverb ever have seen Mrs. rady.
The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from the celestial beauty. As she partakes more or less of this heavenly light, she informs, with corresponding characters, the fleshly te which she chooses, and frames to herself a suitable mansion.
All whily proves that the soul of Mrs. rady, in her pre-existent state, was no great judge of architecture.
To the same effect, in a Hymn in honour of Beauty, divine Spenser, platonizing, sings
----- "Every Spirit as it is more pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
*Swift
[p 260]
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grad amiable sight.
For of the soul the body form doth take:
For soul is form, and doth the body make."
But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. rady.
These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philosophy; for here, in his very stanza but one, is a saving clause, which throws us all out again, and leaves us as much to seek as ever : --
"Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind
Dwells in deformed tabernacle drownd
Either by ce, against the course of kind,
Or through unaptness in the substance found,
Which it assumed of some stubbround,
That will not yield unto her forms dire,
But is performd with some foul imperfe."
From which it would follow, that Spenser had seen somebody like Mrs. rady.
The spirit of this good lady -- her previous anima -- must have stumbled upon one of these untoward tabernacles which he speaks of. A more rebellious odity of clay fround, as the poet calls it, le mind -- and sure hers is one of the ge -- ever had to deal with.
P upon her inexplicable visage -- inexplicable, we mean, but by this modification of the theory -- we have e to a clusion that, if one must be plain, it is better to be plain all over, than, amidst a tolerable residue of features, to hang out ohat shall be exceptionable. No one say of Mrs. radys tehat it would be better if she had but a is impossible to pull her to pieces in this manner. We have seen the most malicious beauties of her own sex baffled iempt at a sele. The tout ensemble defies particularising. It is too plete -- too sistent, as we may say -- to admit of these invidious reservations. It is not as if some Apelles had picked out here a lip -- and there a -- out of the collected ugliness of Greece, to frame a model by. It is a symmetrical whole. We challehe mi oisseur to cavil at any part or parcel of the tenan question; to say that this, or that, is improperly placed. We are vihat true ugliness, han is affirmed of true beauty, is the result of harmony. Like that too it reigns without a petitor. No one ever saw Mrs. rady, without pronoung her to be the plai woman that he ever met with in the course of his life. The first time that you are indulged with a sight of her face, is an era in your existence ever after. Ylad to have seen it -- like Stonehenge. No one pretend tet it. No one ever apologised to her for [p 261] meeting her ireet on such a day and not knowihe pretext would he too bare. Nobody mistake her for another. Nobody say of her, "I think I ave seen that faewhere, but I ot call to mind where." You must remember that in such a parlour it first struck you -- like a bust. You wondered where the owner of the house had picked it up. You wondered more when it b