tudes of children. This is the end of a large portion of the arts of polished life. How many drugs are sold, and how many applications are made for the improvement of beauty? How many artists of different kinds live upon this idea of beauty? If children learn to dance it is chiefly in order to improve and to display their beauty. If they acquire skill in the use of the sword, it is more for the purpose of improving personal beauty than for defence. If this general effort for appearance sometimes leads the decrepid and deformed into absurdity, and produces fantastic characters among the young, it has, however, a great and national effect in forming the counte nance, not less than the attitudes and movements of the person.

Of its effect in creating distinctions among nations in which different ideas of personal beauty prevail, and different means are employed to reach them, we may frame some conception from the differences that take place in the same nation, in which similar ideas exist, and similar means are used to form the person, only in various degrees. What a difference between the soft and elegant tints of complexión generally seen in women who move in the higher cir cles of society, and the coarse ruddiness of the vul

gar

!-between the uncouth features, and unpliant limbs of an unpolished rustic, and the complacency of countenance, the graceful figure, and easy air and movement of persons in cultivated life!-between the shaped and meaning face of a well bred lady, and the soft and plump simplicity of a country girl! -We now easily account for these varieties which have become familiar to the eye, because we see the operation of their causes. But if we should find an entire nation distinguished by a composition of features resembling the one, and another by the contrary, they would have as fair a title to be ranked under different species by certain philosophers as the German, and the Tartar. The general countenance of Europe was, probably, more various several centuries ago than at present. The differences, which arise out of the state of society as their principal cause are, insensibly wearing away in proportion as, in the progress of refinement, the manners and ideas of the European nations are gradually approximating one standard. But the effect of a common standard of beauty, and the means employed by our own countrymen to form their persons after this ideal model are, through the influence of custom, and general example, often little observed. The means

parts of the East, large eyes are esteemed beautiful; and in these countries they take extaordinary pains to increase their aperture. In many parts of India they flatten the foreheads of their children in infancy by the application of broad plates of lead. In China they compress the feet of female infants by tight bandages. Among many of the barbarous tribes of

tween the North-American indians, and north-eastern Asiatics, gives strong indications of a common origin. The SouthAmerican continent, particularly on the western side, gives no less striking proofs of its having been peopled from the islands of the Great South Sea; as they were peopled originally from the South of Asia. The inhabitants of the southern portion of the Farther India are evidently of Malayan origin. And the same people you trace from that continent through a succession of islands till you approach the western side of America; whence a population of the same, or very similar character appears to have spread from Peru and Chili along the Oronoco, and the different tributary streams of the Maragnon. And here accordingly you meet with various tribes of indians of handsomer form and features than those of North-America, and not unlike, in their appearance, many of the islanders of the South Sea.-Remotely, however, these people have all, probably, the same origin. The Malays are of Tartar race, improved by the mild climate of Southern Asia. These, passing through the equally mild climates of the Pacific ocean ap pear to have reached America in that direction; while NorthAmerica has received her population from Tartary through the rougher climates of Siberia.-Other parts of this continent may have received many accidental emigrants cast upon its shores, in a long succession of ages, from different portions of the Old

Africa, and in the northern regions of Asia they en deavour to assist the influence of the climate by using violence to flatten the nose of every infant in order to mould it after their capricious idea of beauty. The American indians study to render the natural darkness of their complexion deeper by discolouring paints and unguents: and all savages esteem certain kinds of deformity to be perfections; and strive to increase the admiration of their

persons

by heightening the wildness of their features. I might proceed, in this manner, through every country on the globe, pointing out the many arts which are practised to reach some favorite idea of the human form. Arts which insensibly, in a long course of time, produce great and striking consequences, and which, although commonly supposed to

World. The nations from which they parted may have been civilized; but arriving in a new world, without skill to return, or to hold any intercourse with their ancestral seats, and pressed by their immediate wants, and the difficulties of procuring subsistence in an uncultivated wilderness, from any source except from hunting, they would soon lose the knowledge of all other arts, and their posterity would necessarily become Savages.

* National ideas of beauty may often have their source in the tendencies of the climate, and the natural influences of so

used by other nations, who aim at a different idea, attracting more notice by their novelty, will, therefore, furnish us with more striking examples. Many of the nations beyond the Indus, as well as the Tartars, from whom they have derived their origin, universally admire small eyes, and large ears. They are at great pains, therefore, to compress their eye-lids at the corners, and stretch their ears by weights appended to them, or by drawing them frequently with the hand, and by cutting their rims, so that they may hang down to their shoulders, which they consider among the highest ornaments of their persons.--For a like reason, they extirpate the hair from their bodies; and, on the face, they leave only a few tufts here and there, which they

*

*It is probable that the countries of India and China, considering the pleasantness of those inviting climates, were originally inhabited before the regions of Tartary. But, the frequent conquests to which they have since been subject, particularly, the northern parts of India, from Tartarian tribes, have changed the habits, ideas, and persons of the people even more, perhaps, than Europe was changed by the barbarians who overran it in the fifth and sixth centuries. The present population of Northern India is, in effect, Tartarian, only changed to softer features, and better proportioned persons, by a milder climate, and a more improved state of society.