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which she insists, that it is the lot of no one but herself. "A woman," says the President Henault, "will praise one of her sex for any thing but her beauty;" that is, she will praise her for any or every honourable distinction, for the very purpose of denying that she has the smallest pretensions of face. "Miss is very clever, and plays charmingly on the harpsichord-in other words, she is any thing but handsome."

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No persons have a more hyperbolical opinion of the power and glory of beauty, than the unelect; and hinc ille lachrymæ; hence undoubtedly their peevishness and spite. They attach to it a significance that is altogether romantic, and with this exaggerated estimate of it in their hearts, betray their secret with their tongues, either by denying its existence against the most irresistible evidence, or by refusing to it that moderate degree of control which really and plainly belongs to it. A woman of sense and feeling, without exterior attractions, regards a beauty as an unrighteous tyrant; one who, on the strength of her mere clay, usurps all hearts; arrogates to herself the empire of love, a passion which she can neither understand nor requite, to the exclusion of those who, whatever may be their features, alone have souls fit for its home and its worship. This is not true:beauty has no such excesses to answer for. The conduct of men, since the Deluge, has proved, that love (the true thing) is not mere fealty to a face. The very least angelical, who reasonably contend for all the mind and feeling of the sex, should know, that all which is most profound and impassioned in that sentiment which beauty, to say the worst of it, can no more than inspire, will be given to their worthiness; and with this distinguished advantage, that, being raised on the only safe foundation, it will, when once accorded to them, endure for ever. Beauty may be a short cut to that eminence, which ugliness, or any thing else that you please better than beauty, must reach by a dark, doubtful, and circuitous route: but if her possession is more immediate, it is less secure; if her rule is more absolute, it is less constant and durable. If an ugly woman of wit

and worth cannot be loved till she is known, a beautiful fool will cease to please when she is found out.

A greater variety-a more certain and rapid succession of miscellaneous homage-this truly is chargeable to beauty; but surely the ultra-sentimental should not make this barren honour a subject for their envy and disquiet. Instantaneous and universal admiration-the eye-worship of the world, is unquestionably the reward of the best faces; and the male-contents had much better come into the general opinion with a good grace, than be making themselves at once unhappy and ridiculous, by their hollow and self-betraying recusancy. Let them face the truth boldly; it is not worth the pains of opposition. Concede to the pretty tyrant all that she asks and can obtain, and it is still but a trifle. There are differences of opinion, it is true, on this point. Madame de Staël, with all her genius and knowledge, and with no imperfect consciousness of her merits, is reported to have declared, that she would cheerfully have given up her accumulated and various distinctions, for the single attribute of beauty. Her name is high authority certainly, but will scarcely sanctify such profanation as this. If she really made so silly a declaration, and made it from her heart, it proves only, that profound sensibility, and a generous ambition, were not among the number of her many eminent qualifications. woman--the Frenchwoman--was uppermost, in spite of all her philosophy. If fame, the notice of numbers, was her object, she must have been a loser by the exchange of means which she desired; for she never could have been seen so extensively as she has been heard. If it was the dominion of love that she calculated upon, we must conclude that, being already married, her pride would have been to please, not a husband, but a host. So weak an aspiration might be pardoned in a girl too young to feel a sterling passion, and to form a rational preference; but one who, without beauty, had already secured its noblest triumphs-what was the gift to do for her? what influence was it to bring that could aid-nay, in the spirit in which it was coveted, that would not

The

obstruct her feelings and duties, as a wife and a mother? Her husband, we may presume, was satisfied: for whose sake then was she so desirous of personal charms? Such a preference, in France, I dare say, might be considered to be in the very finest spirit of feminine tenderness and dignity. A faddling old beau of that country, St. Evremond, has asserted that "a woman would sooner lose her lover than her beauty;" and the fact is certainly conceivable. It is possible that a woman would resign a lover for that which won him; the particular attachment of any single heart, for the glory of general conquest; the man for the species. She may doat upon Thomas, perhaps; but would see him drown himself, rather than lose the lustre of a pair of eyes which have been the ruin of Thomas, and may destroy, if she pleases, Richard, and Robert, and as many more as she may chance to look upon. There is nothing anti-Gallican at least, I fancy, in this liberal mode of feeling. Where there is no domestic privacy, where the whole business of life centres in public exhibition and display, it is but natural that a woman's chief care should be to make herself as diffusive as possible. In our own country, where a woman does not consider her loveliness as misapplied in the nursery, or altogether thrown away upon a husband, such heartless levity, if not without examples, would be scorned, I trust, by the sex.

I would not fall into the opposite extreme of Turkish watchfulness and monopoly. Though she should not be always gadding about, I would not withhold from beauty her reasonable liberties, or lock her up in constant confinement, with no witnesses but the company provided for her by love and the law. Let her not forget that she has a heart for one; and I will admit, under such limitations as modesty may suggest, that she has a face for all. A pretty woman was made, I suppose, among other things, to be looked at; and she is, therefore, not without excuse, if it be her pride to appear now and then among her fellow-creatures, purely as a show. The preservation of her dignity, with such freedom of display, will depend, of course, upon the art and delicacy

with which she may keep up her air of humility and unconsciousness.

I am purposely considering beauty only in its simplest elements and simplest effects, detached entirely from its power of inspiring love-not because 1 exactly doubt its power, but because I sincerely believe that it has no exclusive privileges in this respect-no pretensions for which ample equivalents may not be presented by every one with the face of woman. Even thus stripped and isolated-a mere gaud and toy-it has manifest advantages. It is pleasing, exceedingly pleasing, only to look at a beautiful woman; and there can be nothing disagreeable in the sensation of being the object so looked upon. What may be the kind and amount of gratification, it is not for me to decide. It must be something: abuse, despise, the bauble, as we please, it would be as well, after all, to be good-looking, if you could so manage the matter, particularly as there is no reason why you should not when you are about it, to have every other quality that can exalt or adorn our nature.

One mode of consolation with people whose perfections are all out of sight, is, to assume it as a physiological fact, that where nature has been scrupulously careful in the moulding and finishing of her visible and material work-where she has laboured hard at a blue eye, or touched and re-touched upon the fall of a pair of shoulders; she has been proportionably hasty and negligent in her mysterious preparations for that unseen, but not unimportant, functionary, the brain. It is not a tenet, with these schismatics, that there is no such thing as beauty; they modestly hold only, that whereever it betrays itself, it is a sure sign of mental imbecility. "Very pretty, but a fool," is their invariable award; as if sense and knowledge could only wear a set of irregular features and a sallow complexion.— Without inquiring into the reason ableness of this statement, I venture to say, that it is in direct contradiction to popular opinion. By common courtesy, the handsome man is at least not a fool till you know him: as long as there is nothing against him but his good looks, they may fairly be consorted, in your fancy,

with every embellishment of mind that can give beauty a meaning, or ugliness a mask. You cannot decide what it may be his fate to discover of himself; and as he stands before you, only an Apollo, he demands from you a liberal construction. He may be as captivating as wit can make him-equal, perhaps, to any man, in all his hidden attributes, as he is superior, you see, to most men, in his outward form and proportions. He and the most hideous of men are equal till they speak, as men; and this being so, his beauty is just so much clear and unopposed advantage. He is a philosopher-a lawgiver-in the public streets; and has moreover the best turned leg that you shall see among ten thousand.

Qualifications, indeed, far less prepossessing, and that appeal much less forcibly to the heart, than beauty, are quite sufficient to gain a person credit for his full share of all the gifts and acquirements that are natural to his place in society. The spirit of that liberal maxim of our law, which holds a man innocent till he is proved to be guilty, directs generally, under certain conditions, all our judgments, or guesses, rather, as to the powers and pretensions of all who present themselves to our notice. One of the conditions is, that a man shall not be very poor-not stand forward in the undisguised infamy of a shabby coat and torn breeches. Such a one, it is a hundred to one, without inquiry, is either a blockhead or a rogue. A well-dressed man, on the contrary, is prima facie a pleasant fellow: till it is "known what he is, we agree at once (his hat is warrant enough for us) that he is what he may be and what be ought to be. All the higher qualities of the mind, like the distinctions of rank, are included with particular provisions of the wardrobe and the toilet. An individual ties his neckcloth in a given style, and comes forth a scholar and a gentleman of course. Every one has credit for those endowments which be long to certain classes of coats: my lord duke and his butler are, with the million, just a pair. A good coat may not be quite so effective as a good person-but, combined, they are irresistible. The fact is so; there is Do good in making oneself uneasy

about it. We, who are not more conscious of our moral superiority, than of our less promising appearance, may sneer, for our hearts' ease, at the obvious emptiness of the coxcomb who, with the aid of his exterior alone, is carrying away from us all admiration; but the provoking truth is, that, while his fine person and fine clothes are largely admired for their own sakes, they are still more especially triumphant, from their natural connexion, in the estimation of the many, with a hundred fine qualities of the soul, of which, in reality, the ninny is as guiltless as his horse. "Well," says Miss B"I must say, that Charles is the most entertaining young man that ever I met with; and, Lucy, don't you think he is remarkably handsome?" This is putting the cart before the horse, but the ladies are not aware of any such blunder. They know that the spark is handsome, and they find him agreeable, not, as they conclude in the simplicity of their hearts, for that plain reason;-but because he is so clever, so gay, so humourous, so any thing indeed but-six feet high and a little over-though they will not deny his meritoriousness on that account-and why should they?

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This supremacy of beauty, where people can be judged only by their looks, is so incontestible, that a plain, weakly man, whatever may be his mental powers, cannot find himself, apart from those who know and value him, hemmed in amongst strangers by the tall and the plump and the ruddy, without a slight sense of unworthiness and abasement. such circumstances, in spite of reason and innocence, he cannot help feeling a little ashamed of himself. The pale poet, whose works enchant us all, is nobody in the Park: with his shrunk cheeks and spindle legs, he sneaks along, as little noticed as a fly; while a thousand fond eyes are fixed on the gay and handsome apprentice there, with just intellect enough to make the clothes which make him. He will be despised, I admit, as soon as he is explained-but till then, his superiority in the passing notice of the multitude is not to be denied. It is not my purpose to claim for beauty any thing not intrinsically its own. I will admit the

folly when it is fairly proved the possible folly-but I will not allow that a fine face is by a law of destiny the only type of a weak head. On the contrary, I devoutly believe that the lovely eyes of Mary Eare the index of a mind full of intelligence, fancy, and tenderness; and no one but herself shall ever shake this opinion. She may have, and therefore, for me, has, the richest endowments of the soul; and, super added to these, she has a face which any man might be proud to idolize for its own sake for a week at least. The season of explanation and contempt may come-but still there is a triumph.

This then is the undeniable advantage of beauty: it may fail when convicted as an idiot; but till then it is secure of attention and respect. It cannot make head against talents in direct conflict and fair battle; but, under its own colours, with a sort of neutrality on the part of mind, it sails through the world, conquering and to conquer. The ugly may desire, and the beautiful dread, to be known -the difference between them in the interim being, that the former are disregarded, while the latter are followed and admired. Let wisdom with its plain face regard this difference without malice; for, after all, what is it worth?-a little empty, precarious, perishable homage. It is compliment enough to the sovereignty of mind, that beauty must at least be supposed to be united with it, before it can assume its full authority. There is no limit to the influence of talents and hard-favoured countenances among friends, or wherever they have a field for action; eventually they must and will prevail, and may well afford to concede to beauty its fickle triumphs and brief superiority, to wink good-naturedly at the simpleton's tricks; and, as they know she cannot maintain her ground against the scrutiny of near friends and judges, to allow her, without snarling, all the credit she can raise, in her light and skimming communication with the ignorant crowd. The vain butterfly, they know, will be discovered to be a worm at last.

There is a danger, however, which the ugly find it difficult to put up with, with any degree of patience.

It sometimes happens, they say, even when the creatures are thoroughly detected — established fools - that they still maintain their influence undiminished. You may see a lady, on the strength of nothing in the world but a pair of sparkling eyes, tyrannize over her husband-a sensible, discriminating man, too-as if he was the meanest and simplest of slaves. Love at first sight with such dolls might be forgiven; we complain that the love sometimes has the hardihood to bear a second sight— one a twelvemonth long, perhaps. There is some truth in this, but it must not be valued at more than it is worth. The fascination of beauty may for a time be so predominant as to warp or suspend our judgment, and make us confound the nature and differences of things. It is very conceivable that a man, haunted by a pretty face, may, till he is a little reconciled to his familiar, find himself involuntarily referring to it as his sole standard and authority, in questions with which it has no concern-mistaking good teeth, perhaps, for good nature, and a silly remark for a dimple in the chin. But such blind adoration as this, unless where two fools come together, must soon have a period. It is impossible to be intimate with folly without despising it. Every body thinks the pretty Mrs. D- agreeable, except her husband; and he, good man, to do him justice, and not to speak of beauty too lightly, resisted conviction with all becoming obstinacy and gallantry. Every charm of his wife's face and person supplied him in its turn with weapons, sword and shield, against every effort she made to disenchant herself. Her eyes served him for many a day as a sure artillery against all that she chose to say, or not to say. She had no tastes or feelings in common with him ;-but then her complexion! It required almost six months to convince him, that this was not an excuse for her falling asleep when he was reading Guy Mannering to her. He took shelter behind her legs, for I know not how long, against an idle habit she had of never being serious, except when called upon to understand a joke. He found an answer to his wit in her ancles; her foot was a repartee for a month; and after