I. The most mythic is of course St. Sophia; the shade of the Greek Athena, passing into the ‘Wisdom’ of the Jewish Proverbs and Psalms, and the Apocryphal ‘Wisdom of Solomon.’  She always remains understood as a personification only; and has no direct influence on the mind of the unlearned multitude of Western Christendom, except as a godmother,—­in which kindly function she is more and more accepted as times go on; her healthy influence being perhaps greater over sweet vicars’ daughters in Wakefield—­when Wakefield was,—­than over the prudentest of the rarely prudent Empresses of Byzantium.

II.  Of St. Catharine of Egypt there are vestiges of personal tradition which may perhaps permit the supposition of her having really once existed, as a very lovely, witty, proud, and ‘fanciful’ girl.  She afterwards becomes the Christian type of the Bride, in the ’Song of Solomon,’ involved with an ideal of all that is 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 “Tunis 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 Lombard bell-tower on the mountains, and the English spire on Sarum plain, the geometric majesty of the Egyptian maid became glorious in harmony of defence, and sacred with precision of symbol.

As the buildings which showed her utmost skill were chiefly exposed to lightning, she is invoked in defence from it; and our petition in the Litany, against sudden death, was written originally to her.  The blasphemous corruptions of her into a patroness of cannon and gunpowder, are among the most ludicrous, (because precisely contrary to the original tradition,) as well as the most deadly, insolences and stupidities of Renaissance Art.