To an exact perfection they have brought
    The action love, the passion is forgot.[464]

“How could you,” said he, “leave such a hint so coldly?  How could Aspasia[465] and Sempronia[466] enter into your imagination at the same time, and you never declare to us the different reception you gave them?  The figures which the ancient mythologists and poets put upon love and lust in their writings, are very instructive.  Love is a beauteous blind child, adorned with a quiver and a bow, which he plays with, and shoots around him, without design or direction; to intimate to us, that the person beloved has no intention to give us the anxieties we meet with; but that the beauties of a worthy object are like the charms of a lovely infant:  they cannot but attract your concern and fondness, though the child so regarded is as insensible of the value you put upon it, as it is that it deserves your benevolence.  On the other side, the sages figured Lust in the form of a satyr; of shape, part human, part bestial; to signify, that the followers of it prostitute the reason of a man to pursue the appetites of a beast.  This satyr is made to haunt the paths and coverts of the wood-nymphs and shepherdesses, to lurk on the banks of rivulets, and watch the purling streams (as the resorts of retired virgins), to show, that lawless desire tends chiefly to prey upon innocence, and has something so unnatural in it, that it hates its own make, and shuns the object it loved, as soon as it has made it like itself.  Love therefore is a child that complains and bewails its inability to help itself, and weeps for assistance, without an immediate reflection of knowledge of the food it wants:  Lust, a watchful thief which seizes its prey, and lays snares for its own relief; and its principal object being innocence, it never robs, but it murders at the same time.  From this idea of a Cupid and a Satyr, we may settle our notion of these different desires, and accordingly rank their followers.  Aspasia must therefore be allowed to be the first of the beauteous Order of Love, whose unaffected freedom, and conscious innocence, give her the attendance of the graces in all her actions.  That awful distance which we bear towards her in all our thoughts of her, and that cheerful familiarity with which we approach her, are certain instances of her being the truest object of love of any of her sex.  In this accomplished lady, love is the constant effect, because it is never the design.  Yet, though her mien carries much more invitation than command, to behold her is an immediate check to loose behaviour; and to love her is a liberal education:[467] for, it being the nature of all love to create an imitation of the beloved person in the lover, a regard for Aspasia naturally produces decency of manners, and good conduct of life in her admirers.  If therefore the giggling Lucippe could but see her train of fops assembled, and Aspasia move by them, she would be mortified at the veneration