mind. Possibly, however, our loss is rather imaginary than real, greater in quantity than in quality. Men's intellects, like their frames, continue pretty much the same in all ages, and the human faculty, limited in its sphere of action, and operating always upon the same materials, soon arrives at an impassable acme which leaves us nothing to do but to ring the changes upon antiquity. Half our epic poems. are modifications of Homer, though none are equal to that primitive model; our Ovidian elegies, our Pindarics, and our Anacreontics, all resemble their first parents in features as well as in name. Fertilizing our minds with the brains of our predecessors, we raise new crops of the old grain, and pass away to manure the intellectual field for future harvests of the same description. Destruction and reproduction is the system of the moral as well as of the physical world.

An anonymous book loses half its interest; it is the voice of the invisible, an echo from the clouds, the shadow of an unknown substance, an abstraction devoid of all humanity. One likes to hunt out an author, if he be dead, in obituaries and biographical dictionaries; to chase him from his birth; to be in at his death, and learn what other offspring of his brain survive him. Even an assumed name is better than none; though it is clearly a nominal fraud, a desertion from our own to enlist into another identity. It may be doubted whether we have any natural right thus to leap down the throat, as it were, of an imaginary personage, and pass off a counterfeit of our own creation for genuine coinage. But the strongest semi-vitality, or zoophite state of existence, is that of the writers of Ephemerides, who squeeze the whole bulk of their individuality into the narrow compass of a single consonant or vowel; who have an alphabious being as Mr. A., a liquid celebrity under the initial of L., or attain an immortality of zig-zag under the signature of Z. How fantastical to be personally known as an impersonal, to be literally a man of letters, to have all our virtues and talents entrusted to one little hieroglyphic, like the bottles in the apothecary's shop. Compared to this ignoble imprisonment, how light the punishment of the negligent Sylph, who was threatened to Be stopp'd in vials, or transfix'd with pins,

Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,
Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye;
Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,

While clogg'd, he beats his silken wings in vain.

So gross are my perceptions, that my mind refuses to take cognizance of these Magazine sprites, in their alphabetical and shadowy state. I animate these monthly apparitions, put flesh and blood around the bones of their letters, and even carry my humanity so far as to array theirs in appropriate garments. I have an ideal (not always a beau ideal) of every one of the contributors to the New Monthly, as accurate, no doubt, as the notion which Lavater formed of men's characters from their autograph. Sometimes, however, this Promethean art has been a puzzling process. One Essayist, wishing to immortalize himself, like the Wat Tylericide Mayor of London, by a dagger, assumed that note of reference as his signature, and occasioned me infinite trouble in providing a sheath of flesh. Another, who now honourably wields the sword of justice in the land of the convict and the kangaroo, used to distinguish his well-written papers

VOL. VII. NO. XXIX.

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by three daggers at once, taxing my imagination to the utmost by this tripartite individuality, and making expensive demands upon the wardrobe of my brain. A third held out a hand at the bottom of his page, beckoning me to its welcome perusal-a symbol which my eye. (if the catachresis may be allowed) was always eager to grasp and shake, and to which my fancy affixed a body with as much confidence as he who conjured up a Hercules from a foot. But the most bewildering of these contractions of humanity was the subscription of a star; for, after a man had become sidereal and accomplished his apotheosis, it seemed somewhat irreverend to restore him to his incarnate state.

"This raised a mortal to the skies,

That drew an author down."

I brought down these Astræi from their empyrean, remodelled their frames, gave them a suit of clothes for nothing, and had before my mind's eye a distinct presentment of their identity.

Even when we assume a literary individuality somewhat more substantial than this fanciful creation; when one is known, propriâ persona, as the real identical Tomkins, who writes in a popular magazine under the signature of any specific letter, to what does it amount?— an immortality of a month, after which we are tranquilly left to enjoy an eternity-of oblivion. Our very nature is ephemeral: we "come like shadows, so depart." From time to time some benevolent and disinterested compiler endeavours to pluck us from the Lethean gulf, by republishing our best papers under the captivating title of "Beauties of the Magazines," "Spirit of the modern Essayists," or some such embalming words; but alas! like a swimmer in the wide ocean, who attempts to uphold his sinking comrade, he can but give him a few moments' respite, when both sink together into the waters of oblivion. We know what pains have been taken to appropriate Addison's and Steele's respective papers in the Spectator, distinguished only by initials. Deeming my own lucubrations (as what essayist does not?) fully entitled to the same anxious research, I occasionally please myself with dreaming that some future Malone, seated in a library, as I am at this present moment, may take down a surviving volume of the New Monthly, and naturally curious to ascertain the owner of the initial H, may discover by ferreting into obituaries and old newspapers, that it actually designates a Mr. Higginbotham, who lies buried in Shoreditch church. Anticipating a handsome monument with a full account of the author, and some pathetic verses by a poetical friend, he hurries to the spot, and after an infinity of groping, assisted by the sexton's spectacles, discovers a flat stone, which, under the customary emblems of a death's head and cross bones, conveys the very satisfactory information that the aforesaid Mr. Higginbotham was born on one day and died upon another. Of all the intervening period, its hopes and fears, its joys and miseries, its verse and prose, not an atom farther can be gleaned. And this it is to be a writer of Ephemerides! Verily, Mr. Editor, the idea is so disheartening, that I should be tempted to commit some rash act, and perpetrate publication on my own account, but that I have before my eyes the fate of certain modern Blackmores, impressing upon me the salutary truth, that if we must perish and be forgotten, it is better to die of a monthly essay than an annual epic.

H.

UGLY WOMEN.

"Un homme rencontre une femme, et est choqué de sa laideur; bientôt, si elle n'a pas de prétentions, sa physionomie lui fait oublier les défauts de ses traits, il la trouve aimable, et conçoit qu'on puisse l'aimer; huit jours après il a des espérances, huit jours après on les lui retire, huit jours après il est fou." DE L'AMOUR.

THE ancient inhabitants of Amathus, in the island of Cyprus, were the most celebrated statuaries in the world, which they almost exclusively supplied with gods and goddesses. Every one who had a mind to be in the vogue ordered his deity from those fashionable artists: even Jupiter himself was hardly considered orthodox and worshipworthy, unless emanating from the established Pantheon of the Cypriots; and as to Juno, Venus, Minerva, and Diana, it was admitted that they had a peculiar knack in their manufacture, and it need hardly be added that they drove a thriving trade in those popular goddesses. But this monopoly was more favourable to the fortunes than to the happiness of the parties. By constantly straining above humanity and aspiring to the representation of celestial beauty; by fostering the enthusiasm of their imaginations in the pursuit of the beau idéal, they acquired a distaste, or at least an indifference, for mortal attractions, and turned up their noses at their fair countrywomen for not being Junos and Minervas. Not one of them equalled the model which had been conjured up in their minds, and not one of them, consequently, would they deign to notice. At the public games, the women were all huddled together, whispering and looking glum, while the men congregated as far from them as possible, discussing the beau idéal. Had they been prosing upon politics, you might have sworn it was an English party. "Dancing was extinct unless the ladies chose to lead out one another; the priests waxed lank and woe-begone for want of the marriage offerings: Hymen's altar was covered with as many cobwebs as a poor's box; successive moons rose and set without a single honeymoon, and the whole island threatened to become an antinuptial colony of bachelors and old maids.

In this emergency, Pygmalion, the most eminent statuary of the place, falling in love with one of his own works, a figure of Diana, which happened to possess the beau idéal in perfection, implored Venus to animate the marble; and she, as is well known to every person conversant with authentic history, immediately granted his request. So far as this couple were concerned, one would have imagined that the evil was remedied; but alas! the remedy was worse than the disease. The model of excellence was now among them, alive and breathing; the men were perfectly mad, beleaguering the house from morn to night to get a peep at her; all other women were treated with positive insult, and of course the whole female population was possessed by all the Furies. Marmorea (such was the name of the animated statue) was no Diana in the flesh, whatever she might have been in the marble; if the scandalous chronicles of those days may be believed, she had more than one favoured lover; certain it is that she was the cause of constant feuds and battles in which many lives were lost, and Pygmalion himself was at last found murdered in the neighbourhood of his own house. The whole island was now on the point of a civil war on account of this philanthropical Helen, when one of her disappointed

wooers, in a fit of jealousy, stabbed her to the heart, and immediately after threw himself from a high rock into the sea.

Such is the tragedy which would probably be enacting at the present moment in every country of the world, but for the fortunate circumstance that we have no longer any fixed standard of beauty, real or imaginary, and by a necessary and happy consequence no determinate rule of ugliness. In fact there are no such animals as ugly women, though we still continue to talk of them as we do of Harpies, Gorgons, and Chimeras. There is no deformity that does not find admirers, and no loveliness that is not deemed defective. Anamaboo, the African prince, received so many attentions from a celebrated belle of London, that, in a moment of tenderness, he could not refrain from laying his hand on his heart and exclaiming, "Ah! madam, if Heaven had only made you a negress, you would have been irresistible!" And the same beauty, when travelling among the Swiss Cretins, heard several of the men ejaculating, "How handsome she is! what a pity that she wants a Goitre!" Plain women were formerly so common that they were termed ordinary, to signify the frequency of their occurrence; in these happier days the phrase extraordinary would be more applicable. However parsimonious, or even cruel, Nature may have been in other respects, they all cling to admiration by some solitary tenure that redeems them from the unqualified imputation of unattractiveness. One has an eye that, like Charity, covers a multitude of sins; another is a female Sampson, whose strength consists in her hair; a third holds your affections by her teeth; a fourth is a Cinderella, who wins hearts by her pretty little foot; a fifth makes an irresistible appeal from her face to her figure, and so on to the end of the catalogue. An expressive countenance may always be claimed in the absence of any definite charm; if even this be questionable, the party generally contrives to get a reputation for great cleverness; and if that too be inhumanly disputed, envy itself must allow that she is "excessively amiable.”

Still it must be acknowledged, that however men may differ as to details, they agree as to results, and crowd about an acknowledged beauty, influenced by some secret attraction of which they are themselves unconscious, and of which the source has never been clearly explained. It would seem impossible that it should originate in any sexual sympathies, since we feel the impulsion without carrying ourselves, even in idea, beyond the present pleasure of gazing, and are even sensibly affected by the sight of beautiful children: yet it cannot be an abstract admiration, for it is incontestable that neither men nor women are so vehemently impressed by the contemplation of beauty in their own as in the opposite sex. This injustice towards our own half of humanity might be assigned to a latent envy, but that the same remark applies to the pleasure we derive from statues, of the proportions of which we could hardly be jealous. Ugly statues may be left to their fate without any compunctious visitings of nature; but our conduct towards women, whom we conceive to be in a similar predicament, is by no means entitled to the same indulgence. We shuffle away from them at parties, and sneak to the other end of the dinner-table as if their features were catching; and as to their falling in love and possessing the common feelings of their sex, we laugh at the very idea. And yet these Parias

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of the drawing-room generally atone, by interior talent, for what they want in exterior charms; as if the Medusa's head were still destined to be carried by Minerva. Nature seldom lavishes her gifts upon one subject the peacock has no voice; the beautiful Camellia Japonica has no odour; and belles, generally speaking, have no great share of intellect. Some visionaries amuse themselves with imagining that the complacency occasioned by the possession of physical charms conduces to moral perfection.

"Why doth not beauty, then, refine the wit,

And good complexion rectify the will?"

This is a fond conceit, unwarranted by earthly test, though destined perhaps to be realized in a happier state of existence.

What a blessing for these unhandsome damsels, whom we treat still more unhandsomely by our fastidious neglect, that some of us are less squeamish in our tastes, and more impartial in our attentions. Solomon proves the antiquity of the adage-" De gustibus nil disputandum," for he compares the hair of his beloved to a flock of goats appearing from Mount Gilead, and in a strain of enamoured flattery exclaims, "Thy eyes are like the fish-pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim: thy nose like the tower of Lebanon looking towards Damascus." Now I deem it as becoming to see a woman standing behind a good roomy nose, as to contemplate a fair temple with a majestic portico; but it may be questioned whether a nose like the tower of Lebanon be not somewhat too elephantine and bordering on the proboscis. The nez retroussé is smart and piquant; the button-nose, like all other diminutives, is endearing; and even the snub absolute has its admirers. Cupid can get over it, though it have no bridge, and jumps through a wall-eye like a harlequin. As to the latter feature my taste may be singular, perhaps bad, but I confess that I have a penchant for that captivating cast, sometimes invidiously termed a squint. Its advantages are neither few nor unimportant. Like a bowl, its very bias makes it sure of hitting the jack, while it seems to be running out of the course; and it has, moreover, the invaluable property of doing execution without exciting suspicion, like the Irish guns with crooked barrels, made for shooting round a corner. Common observers admire the sun in his common state, but philosophers find it a thousand times more interesting when suffering a partial eclipse; while the lovers of the picturesque are more smitten with its rising and setting than with its meridian splendour. Such men must be enchanted with a strabismus or squint, where they may behold the ball of sight gracefully emerging from the nasal East, or setting in its Occidental depths, presenting every variety of obscuration. With regard to teeth, also, a very erroneous taste prevails. Nothing can be more stiff and barrack-like than that uniformity of shape and hue which is so highly vaunted, for the merest tyro in landscape will tell us that castellated and jagged outlines, with a pleasing variety of tints, are infinitely more pictorial and pleasing. Patches of bile in the face are by no means to be deprecated; they impart to it a rich mellow tone of autumnal colouring, which we should in vain seek in less gifted complexions and I am most happy to vindicate the claims of a moderate beard upon the upper lip, which is as necessary to the perfect beauty of the mouth as are the thorns and moss to a rose, or the leaves