constructive arts, as well as from the forms of plants and animals.

Other artists as well as poets should be warned against meanness or
unseemliness. Sculpture and painting equally with music must conform to
the law of simplicity. He who violates it cannot be allowed to work in our
city, and to corrupt the taste of our citizens. For our guardians must
grow up, not amid images of deformity which will gradually poison and
corrupt their souls, but in a land of health and beauty where they will
drink in from every object sweet and harmonious influences. And of all
these influences the greatest is the education given by music, which finds
a way into the innermost soul and imparts to it the sense of beauty and of
deformity. At first the effect is unconscious; but when reason arrives,
then he who has been thus trained welcomes her as the friend whom he always
knew. As in learning to read, first we acquire the elements or letters
separately, and afterwards their combinations, and cannot recognize
reflections of them until we know the letters themselves;--in like manner
we must first attain the elements or essential forms of the virtues, and
then trace their combinations in life and experience. There is a music of
the soul which answers to the harmony of the world; and the fairest object
of a musical soul is the fair mind in the fair body. Some defect in the
latter may be excused, but not in the former. True love is the daughter of
temperance, and temperance is utterly opposed to the madness of bodily
pleasure. Enough has been said of music, which makes a fair ending with
love.

Next we pass on to gymnastics; about which I would remark, that the soul is
related to the body as a cause to an effect, and therefore if we educate
the mind we may leave the education of the body in her charge, and need
only give a general outline of the course to be pursued. In the first
place the guardians must abstain from strong drink, for they should be the