In speaking of the celebrated picture of Titian, in which the famous, or as vulgar opinion says, the infamous Lucrezia Borgia is introduced as presented to her husband by the Madonna, Mrs. Jameson says: “I looked in vain in the countenance of Lucrezia for some trace, some testimony of the crimes imputed to her; but she is a fair, golden-haired, gentle- looking creature, with a feeble and vapid expression.”*

There certainly are instances of persons whose looks have betrayed nothing of the vigor, energy, and strong passions of their nature. Thus of the ferocious ruffian Graham of Claver- house, Sir Walter Scott tells us that he had “a beautiful and melancholy visage, worthy of the most pathetic dreams of romance;” and Lord Byron says that the cruel Ali Pacha was “ mildest-looking gentleman” that he ever saw. The gentle, childish-looking Couthon was unquestionably one of the most ferocious monsters of the French Revolution; and when he was carried to the tribune, as he was required to be on account of his extreme bodily weakness, his soft, mild voice was ever lifted up in calling for more cruel bloodshed, and more sweeping slaughters.

As a general rule, however—and it is a rule which guides us every day in life, and guides us with safety—when furious, and cruel, and treacherous passions live in the heart, they are to be traced in manhood in the lineaments of the face. The personal description of the stalwart Cataline, his pallid complexion, his unpleasant, unhealthy eye,* his walk sometimes rapid, at other times slow, and the frenzy in his face and features, as noticed by Sallust, a great painter, is familiar to all readers. Fuzeli used to decline the company of the famous French painter, David. David had a hare lip; but it was not this innocent disfigurement which displeased Fuzeli. He said, that when he looked at the French artist, he could never divest his mind of the atrocities of the French Eevolution, nor separate them from the part he had acted in them, for they were stamped on his countenance.†

On the whole, in judging of the nature of our fellow-creatures at first sight, an observer with his own heart and feelings as they ought to be, will very rarely be far deceived by confiding in that natural skill in physiognomy with which we all come into the world. “Heaven,” as some one says, “is not in the way of hanging out false colors.” The face is a book in which the innocent and the good may every day read lessons of caution and aversion for their guidance, protection and defence, and find

“How surer than suspicion's thousand eyes

Is that fine sense which to the pure in heart,

By mere repugnancy of their own goodness,

Reveals the approach of evil.”

I do not believe that an authentic instance can be quoted of a thoroughly good man with a sinister expression of counten- ance, though it would appear that there have been bad men with pleasing features ; though I suspect a good eye would have detected a serpent-like beauty in those of them who were decidedly and deliberately wicked. The world does not put any faith in that professional physiognomist who denounced Socrates as a vicious man ; we merely believe that his features were rude and inelegant in the extreme.

There is scarcely a man amongst all the good, great, and wise men of antiquity whom it would be safe to prefer to Phocion—to honest, wise, and witty Phocion. There was a beautiful balance of the moral and intellectual gifts in this man. He was the sagest of his times; and of all the ancients he was, perhaps, as his recorded sayings amply attest, the wittiest. His great moral virtues were rigid honesty, a passionate attachment to truth, and great kindness of disposition. Yet of this admirable man, Plutarch tells us—and he evidently speaks from contemporary statements—that “though one of the most humane and best-tempered men in the world,” his countenance was severe, ill-natured, and forbidding, so much so that it repelled strangers from addressing him.

This account also agrees with an admission in one of Phocion's sayings, that his brow appeared lowering. Yet it is nowhere stated that there were any traces of cunning, of dissimulation, or of sycophancy in this rough face. I think no more can be made of this narrative than that Phocion, like many other good men, was “no beauty”—no Alcibiades, nor Xenophon, nor Critias. And nowhere in this world would the want of fine features in a ruler or general be criticised with more exaggeration of severity than in Athens—Athens, which though deficient in beautiful women, boasted above all the states of Greece of her beautiful men.*

On this point, however, it is to be observed that, in general, the vices and the real character, where it is bad, are more easily to be read in the faces of men than of women, owing, no doubt, to the greater shallowness and simplicity of the manly nature, and to the greater power which, in protection of their inferior physical strength, nature has given to women in controlling and concealing the outward expression of the passions which rage, and the fires which burn in their hearts and their brains. A woman certainly is no more to be blamed for having more art in her nature, and more wisdom in her daily contrivances than a man, than a fox is to be censured for having about him more cunning and wiles than a lion.

The face of the man of middle age, whose breast has, for a life-time, been agitated by violent passions, will not be unwrinkled; and the habitual tone of his voice, though he may strive to modulate it to serve his purposes, will have acquired something, at least, of a harshness which once did not belong to it. But it is not uncommon to meet with a woman who has passed through a painful career of crimes and passions, of agony and grief, still speaking with the sweet voice which enchanted the listener in the days of her innocence and happiness, still wearing the composed features, the “cheek unpro- faned by a tear,” which might be thought to betoken days spent wholly in the indolent enjoyment of pleasure, and with a brow still perfectly smooth; as smooth, indeed, as the ocean in a calm—that same ocean which, a few hours before, has torn to pieces in its fury, and engulphed in its never satiated jaws, noble fleets of which not a trace can now be found on its bosom—that calm bosom which invites the disconsolate to rest upon it, and there find peace to their troubled hearts.

The reader who believes all that is recorded of the crimes of Lucrezia, and looks to the portrait of her as described by Mrs. Jameson, even after he makes allowance for some sweetness which the great art of Titian may have added to it, has a striking illustration of these remarks and is compelled to con- fess that this is not the woman that he looked for. Even he, who charitably and better instructed, can find no good evidence of the. more dreadful and more disgusting crimes attributed to Lucrezia, must still look for something harsh, distracted, or melancholy in the face of the woman who was the daughter of Alexander, and the sister of Cæsar Borgia, who had been brought up aud had lived so much amidst scenes of infamy, and witnessed, as she must have witnessed, so much of habitual, and daily, and revolting wickedness. But less flattering describers than Titian have testified that the traces neither of sin nor of sorrow were to be found in her fair face.

Lucrezia, however, notwithstanding the lustre thrown around her by the pencil of the painter and the verses of a poet she patronised, was not exactly a beauty. The contrast between the fair golden hair and black eyes, given to her by the great artist, is always striking, as in nature it is extremely rare. In picture galleries all the celebrated Italian women of Lucrezia's time appear with this fascinating half-flaxen, half- golden hair which painters give to their Venuses and other ideal beauties. It may hence be doubted if the charming color of Lucrezia's hair was not the production of her own skill, though in bare justice, we must give a woman full credit for all the beauty with which she can array herself, and judge of her as she appears at her best, in fair reward of the amiable desire to please which leads to the use and perfection of the cosmetic science.

The world of antiquity allowed to the Queen of Heaven herself all the graces and witchcrafts which she could derive from placing the celestial girdle around her waist ; and no earthly woman deserves either commendation or thanks for being less beautiful than she might be if she liked. On the matter of fact, as to whether the hair of Lucrezia was by nature or only by art golden, there is, I believe, no evidence. For the rest of her features and person, between the favorable eulogium of an Italian poet and the more specific criticism of a German prose writer, agreeing together in substance, as praise and censure often do, and taking these two descriptions along with her portraits, we learn pretty accurately what this famous woman was like. Her eyes were black and piercing, and her luxuriant hair fell in profusion over her shoulders. She had it tied tastefully with a black band. Her figure was large, and it had the great fault of exhibiting something like a masculine vigor in it. Her features were far from being regular. Her forehead was indeed comely and well shaped, but her nose was long and slender; her lips were deficient in fullness, and the lower part of her face was retreating. Such is the picture which is compounded out of the materials furnished by Strozzi and Burckhardt, as they are quoted by M. Chasles.*

Leigh Hunt, in one of his essays on female beauty, assures us, on the evidence of his own eyes, that the hair of Lucrezia was of that color which is justly and properly called golden. Mr. Hunt was in possession of an interesting and affecting relic of mortality—a solitary hair of this famous woman's head. “It was given us,” he says, “by a lamented friend (Lord Byron,) who obtained it from a lock of her hair preserved in the Ambrosian Library, at Milan. On the envelope he put a happy motto, ‘and beauty draws us with a single hair.’ If ever hair was golden it is this. It is not red, it is not yellow, it is not auburn; it is golden and nothing else; and though natural-looking too, must have had a surprising appearance in the mass. Lucrezia, beautiful in every respect, must have looked like a vision in a picture, an angel from the sun. Everybody who sees it, cries out and pronounces it the real thing.

“We must confess, after all, we prefer the auburn, as wo construe it. It forms, we think, a finer shade for the skin, a richer warmth, a darker lustre. But Lucrezia's hair must have been still divine. Mr. Lander, whom we had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with over it, as other acquaintances com- mence over a bottle, was inspired on this occasion with the following verses:—

“Borgia, thou once wert almost too august

And high for adoration ; now thou rt dust;

All that remains of thee these plaits unfold,

Calm hair meandering with pellucid gold.”

“The sentiment,” continues Mr. Hunt, “implied in the last line will be echoed by even bosom that has worn a lock of hair next it, or longed to do so. Hair is at once the most delicate and lasting of our materials, and survives us like love. It is so light, so gentle, so escaping from the idea of death, that with a lock of hair belonging to a child or a friend, we may almost look up to heaven and compare notes with the angelic nature; may almost say , ‘I have a piece of thee here, not unworthy of thy being now.’”*

This is a very learned and exquisitely fine and tender discourse on hair. As regards the great beauty which Leigh Hunt attributes to Lucrezia, I must say that, although it may be quite safe and perfectly logical to judge of the stature of Hercules by his foot; and though both ancient history and a beautiful modern fairy tale join in informing us that a man of susceptible feelings is able to fall in love with a woman at the bare sight of one of her slippers, it yet appears like the sublime of gallant rapture to discover, from the inspection of a single hair from that large flowing mass — and in hair, mere length and quantity are undoubtedly great beauties— which once adorned the head of Lucrezia Borgia, that her large and tall person was “beautiful in every respect.”

A cold-hearted sneerer may think that Leigh Hunt and Walter Savage Landor more than came up to a parallel with the man immortalised by Hierocles, the Joe Miller of the ancients, who, having a house for sale, went “about amongst the public, carrying a brick in his pocket as a specimen. The single brick would at least show of what materials the man's house was constructed; but the single hair, besides that it might be dyed, might be a selected hair. For there is one peculiarly bewitching sort of hair which Leigh Hunt has unfortunately omitted to commemorate and laud in his catalogue though it is capable of competing for victory with the very finest and rarest. This consists of soft auburn locks, intermingled here and there with bright golden hairs. This kind of hair, which is extremely difficult to find, will do much for a woman's head which has nothing else, externally or internally, to recommend it to admiration or love.

The character of Lucrezia Borgia has labored with the mass of readers, from her own day to ours, under terrible stains ; but she has not wanted her defenders, and even eulogisers. The greater part of her life appears, in wicked times and in wicked places, to have been passed in all outward decorum, decency and dignity. Eanke quotes from a contemporary report of the Ambassador of Venice to the Court of Rome, a passage about Lucrezia, in which she is called “wise and liberal;” and as her great natural abilities and talents have not been questioned, she is, taking her at the worst estimate that has been formed of her, entitled to this eulogium. Her personal beauty and her moral character have both gained something with posterity by her generous patronage of literature, and particularly of poetry; for a poet who knows his craft, will praise anything or anybody, if he is well paid for his panegyric. It is more to her true glory, that her counsel, her influence, and the free use of her purse, were all given to the establishment and diffusion of the art of printing in Italy.

There was wisdom, as well as liberality and enlightenment in this. The patronage of printing, which in the long run, says M. Chasles, corrects its own errors, was a far more unequivocal proof of her real liberality, than the giving of pensions to sycophantic court poets.