ABSTRACT
According to one story, Sir Purebeauty is constrained to abandon his beloved leisure by the Mephistophelean devices of the temptress Ugliness, who leads him into countless dangers from which he invariably emerges victorious; his victories and successes (his Marengo, Austerlitz and jena) are called the Sublime, the Comic, the Humorous and so forth. The other story tells how the knight, bored by his life of loneliness, sallies forth purposely to seek adversaries and occasions for fighting; he is always vanquished, but even in his overthrow ferum victorem capit, he transforms and irradiates the enemy. Beyond this artificial mythology, this legend composed without the least imagination or literary skill, this miserably dull tale, it is vain to look for anything whatever in the much elaborated theory of German aestheticians known as the Modifications of Beauty.
