6 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
sweethearts for beauty, feature, bodily form, character, and
fairness.20 In A Ladies Love-Lecture, Richard Brathwait simi-
larly praises women: “Yee worthy Women, who have no
other device but the dresse of vertue to beautifie your Fron-
tispice; yee, who give a gracefull accomplishment to those
three incomparable Ornaments of a Woman, Complexion,
Favour, and Behaviour: for the first, it is your owne, and
not borrowed; for the second, it is ever with a second
Iooke improved; And for the third, it is every way with-
out Affectation accomplished.”21 And yet it is this ingredient
of character which is most important, for beauty is
not praiseworthy unless virtue go with it; beauty of mind
must accompany beauty of body. As the author of The Com-
pleat Woman warns us, “Modesty is a potent charm, without
which Beauty hath no soule.”22 Indeed, Iachimo himself
acknowledges this truth when he comments, in an aside,
upon the attributes of Imogen, at his first sight of her:
AU of her that is out of door most rich!
If she be furnished with a mind so rare,
She is alone the Arabian bird, and I
Have lost the wager.23
Or, as worded by Sir Thomas Overbury, “Good is a fairer
attribute then White, Tis the mindes Beauty keepes the other
sweete.”24 Mrs. Emilia Lanyer, on her part, argues that out-
ward beauty is soon ended by “that tyrant Time,” but that
“A mind enrich’d with Virtue shines more bright,” because it
“addes everlasting Beauty.”25 Interestingly enough, Tasso be-
lieves that outward beauty is really a kind of evidence of in-
ward beauty, since chastity is unable to dwell in an ugly
body: “Because Chastitie is the bewtie of the soule, there is
reason that a faire soule be resident and lodged alwayes (if
it be possible) in a faire body: that very same bewtie which
we see in sweete Gentlewomens faces, being no other thing,