about the time of the Civil Wars; but the
moustache held its own until the Restoration,
when France (from whom we are now
rederiving the more sensible custom of following
nature) dictated to our fashionable bloods
the general use of the razor.

A marked change came over our national
character, and therefore over our national
physiognomy, after the Revolution of sixteen
hundred and eighty-eight. Then commenced
the era of cool, sober sense; of newly-acquired
constitutionalism; of the modern spirit of
energetic, practical life, and of the preponderance
of the mercantile or shop interest. Poetry,
enthusiasm, devotedness to grand abstract principles
at whatever cost, religious mysticism, and
pervading spirituality, had departed from the
faces of all men, great or little; and instead
thereof was a calm, shrewd cleverness, or
a comfortable domesticity. The shape of
the head, too, had greatly deteriorated. It
was beginning to get round, and its outline
was often blurred by the overlapping of flabby
integument. Still, the face of this period was
a fine face upon the whole, and infinitely
superior to that of the next age; but we
begin to see the animalising effects of
habits of intemperance creeping slowly
upwards from the enlarging jaw. Look at the
portrait of Dryden. Intellect sits clearly and
brightly on the broad brow and penetrating
eyes; but the mouth, though full of expression,
is thick and pulpy. And this tendency
of face, which the airy wit of the period of
Anne kept in check, advanced with rapid
strides during the debased times of the
Georges.

One or two fine heads, belonging to the
preceding age still lingered: that of Pope, for
instance, is exquisitely formed, full of thought
ahd sensitiveness, and with noble poetic eyes,
and only wants the presence of health to be
exceedingly handsome. But there were few
faces such as his; and the reason may be
found in the rapid deterioration of our
national intellect and manners. Sensualism,
of the grossest and most unsympathetic kind,
became the rule of life. Excessive eating
and drinking utterly extinguished beneath its
dullness the fine flame of spirituality; and
intellect itself, with a few exceptions, became
hard, bony, and mechanical. The swinishness
of our manners fixed its mark upon our
features. The shape of the head was an irregular
round, larger at the bottom than at the top;
the brow thick, low, and sloping backward;
the nose coarse and big; the mouth fleshy,
lax, ponderous, and earthy. When the
countenance was not of this character, it was poor,
mean, and sharp. A really fine face was
scarcely to be met with. Even the greatest
man of that period—Washington—does not
come up to any very high standard. The
features are humane and intelligent; but
they are deficient in grandeur; they have not
that individuality by which you at once recognise
the man of genius. The countenance is
that of some worthy merchant who has made
his fortune in the ordinary way: not that of
the hero who has emancipated a nation and
founded a galaxy of states. It wants largeness,
profundity, enthusiasm—the
consciousness of a great design to be accomplished
in spite of any obstacle, and to fill the world
with echoes of undying fame. The wig seems
too important a part of it. A somewhat insipid
placidity of expression stands in place of the
daring and energy which you expected. You
do not see that entire devotion to a cause—
that absolute self-absorption in one dominant
idea—that outlooking into the heaven of some
majestic inspiration—which is the characteristic
of all men of original conceptions affecting
the society in which they move. But the
age was not a far-seeing one. It looked only
to itself, and laboured no farther than to meet
its present requirements. It possessed neither
the religious zeal of the Cromwellian period
and Cromwellian men, nor the faith in human
advancement of our own era. Its spirit was
that of the simplest utilitarianism;
unconsciously working for the future, it is true (as
all ages must), but not sublimated by those
ideas of progress and a possible ultimate
perfection which agitate the present times, and
open before them depth after depth of
unfathomable promise.

The degeneration of physiognomy continued
until after the outbreak of the French
Revolution. The advent of that bloody phantom,
walking about in the noonday, startled the
minds of all men into a more useful and
reverent recognition of the spiritualities of
life, and warned them that there was
something else in the world besides an easy self-
indulgence seasoned with school maxims of
conventional morality. From that time men's
faces went on improving—that is to say,
reverted to the fine standard of the
Elizabethan period; and in the present day, our
personal appearance is much more like that
of the men whom Shakspeare saw, than it was
a century, or even sixty years ago. " We
believe," remarks the Athenaeum writer,
"that a better type of physiognomy is beginning
to appear; the face grows more oval,
the forehead higher and fuller, the lips smaller
and firmer, the nose nobler and straighter.
Most of our living authors present much
more of the Elizabethan type." Should the
beard movement prosper (which may Heaven
and good sense direct!) this similarity will be
still more obvious, although the resemblance
goes much farther than an affair of externals.

It may perhaps be laid down as a general
rule, that whenever one's observation is
mainly, and first of all, attracted towards the
lower parts of a face, that face is bad; and
whenever the reverse, that the face is good.
The mouth has its legitimate part to play, and
is a beautiful feature when well formed; but
the ethereal principle, which alone makes the
human face divine, holds its chief residence