there are expressions, conveyed through the medium of a smile, which need not Lavater to inform us that refinement of feeling, or elevation of soul, has little to do with the fair countenance on which they are impressed. On the other hand, there are plain women sometimes met in society, every movement of whose features is instinct with intelligence; who from the genuine heart-warm smiles which play about the mouth, the sweetly modulated voice, and the lighting up of an eye, that looks as if it could "comprehend the universe," become perfectly beautiful to those who live with them and love them. Before such pretensions as these, how soon does the pink-and-white of a merely pretty face vanish to nothing!

Among the many tributes to beauty is an old epigram, that may be new to some; it runs as follows,

"This world's a prison, a sad gloomy den,

Whose walls are the heavens in common:
The jailer is Sin-and the prisoners men,
And the fetters are nothing but women."

Fontenelle thus daintily compliments the sex, when he compares women and clocks-the latter serve to point out the hours, the former to make us forget them.

There is a magic power in beauty that all confess—a strange witchery that fascinates and enchants us with a potency as irresistible as that of the magnet. It is to the moral world what gravitation is to the physical. It is easier to write about beauty in woman and its all-pervading influence, than to define what it is: and, to aid in the dilemma, we cite from an old French writer, its elements in detail:

"Thirty points of perfection each judge understands,
The standard of feminine beauty demands,

Three white and, without further prelude, we know,
That the skin, hands, and teeth should be pearly as snow.
Three black-and our standard departure forbids
From dark eyes, darksome tresses, and darkly fringed lids.
Three red and the lover of comeliness seeks

For the hue of the rose in the lips, nails, and cheeks.
Three long-and of this you, no doubt, are aware,
Long the body should be, long the hands, long the hair.

Three short-and herein nicest beauty appears-
Feet short as a fairy's, short teeth, and short ears.
Three large and remember this rule, as to size,
Embraces the shoulders, the forehead, the eyes.
Three narrow-a maxim to every man's taste-
Circumference small in mouth, ankle, and waist.
Three round :-and in this I see infinite charms-
Rounded fullness apparent in leg, hip, and arms.
Three fine and can aught the enchantment eclipse,
Of fine tapering fingers, fine tresses, fine lips?
Three small and my thirty essentials are told-
Small head, nose, and bosom compact in its mould.
Now the dame who comprises attractions like these,
Will need not the cestus of Venus to please:
While he who has met with an union so rare,
Has had better luck than has fall'n to my share.”

It has been observed that God intended all women to be beautiful, as much as he did the morning-glories and the roses. Beauty is

"Like the sweet South,

That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour."

Ideal beauty, as well as beautiful objects of art and nature, affect us with a sort of sweet contagion. In the contemplation of a fine picture, we drink in the spirit of beauty through the eye; and this is probably the reason why lovely women are occasionally addicted to æsthetics-the study of their charms in the mirror.

Milton supposes Eve was fascinated with her own charms as mirrored in the waters of Paradise, and her daughters have faithfully followed her example, for they are seldom disinclined to contemplate ideal beauty in their own symmetrical forms and features. If the "proper study of mankind is man," why may not woman be allowed a like privilege, for thereby a blemish may be removed and many a charm heightened?

The love of ornament creeps slowly, but surely, into the female heart; the girl who twines the lily in her tresses, and looks at herself in the clear stream, will soon wish that the lily was fadeless, and the stream a mirror.*

* Mrs. S. C. Hall.

Southey, in his Omniana, relates the following:-"When I was last in Lisbon, a nun made her escape from the nunnery. The first thing for which she inquired when she reached the house in which she was to be secreted, was a looking-glass. She had entered the convent when only five years old, and from that time had never seen her own face." There was some excuse for her.

A mirror has been thus variously described, as the only truth-teller in general favour—a journal in which Time records his travels a smooth acquaintance but no flatterer. We may add, that it is the only tolerated medium of reflection upon woman's beauty, and the last discarded; and Queen Elizabeth, we learn, did not desert her looking-glass while there was any vestige left in the way of beauty with which to regale herself.*

The standards of beauty in woman vary with those of taste. Socrates called beauty a short-lived tyranny; Plato, a privilege of nature; Theophrastus, a silent cheat; Theocritus, a delightful prejudice; Carneades, a solitary kingdom; and Aristotle affirmed that it was better than all the letters of recommendation in the world.

In truth, it is difficult to form any notions of beauty. Qualities of personal attraction, the most opposite imaginable, are each looked upon as beautiful in different countries, or by different people in the same country. "That which is deformity at Paris, may be beauty at Pekin ? ”

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-Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape-
Who dost in every country change thy shape;

Here black, there brown, here tawny, and there white !"

The frantic lover sees "Helen's beauty in an Egyptian brow."

When Queen Elizabeth was far advanced in life, she ordered all pictures of herself painted by artists who had not flattered her ugliness, to be collected and burned, and in 1593 issued a proclamation forbidding all persons save special cunning painters" to draw her likeness. She quarrelled at last with her looking-glass, as well as with her painters. During the last years of her life, the maids of honour removed mirrors as they would have removed poison from the apartments of royal pride. It is said that at the time of her death, her wardrobe contained more than two thousand dresses.

The black teeth, the painted eyelids, the plucked eye-brows of the Chinese fair, have admirers; and should their feet be large enough to walk upon, their owners are regarded as monsters of ugliness. The Lilliputian dame is the beau ideal of perfection in the eyes of a northern gallant; while in Patagonia they have a Polyphemus-standard of beauty. Some of the North American nations tie four boards round the heads of their children, and thus squeeze them, while the bones are yet tender, into a square form. Some prefer the form of a sugar-loaf; others have a quarrel with the natural shortness of the ears, and therefore from infancy these are drawn down upon the shoulders!

woman;

With the Modern Greeks, and other nations on the shores of the Mediterranean, corpulency is the perfection of form in a and those very attributes which disgust the western European, form the attractions of an oriental fair. It was from the common and admired shape of his countrywomen, that Rubens in his pictures delights so much in a vulgar and odious plumpness:—when this master was desirous to represent the "beautiful," he had no idea of beauty under two hundredweight. His very Graces are all fat. But it should be remembered that all his models were Dutch women.

The hair is a beautiful ornament of woman, but it has always been a disputed point which colour most becomes it. We account red hair an abomination; but in the time of Elizabeth it found admirers, and was in fashion. Mary of Scotland, though she had exquisite hair of her own, wore red fronts. Cleopatra was red-haired; and the Venetian ladies to this day counterfeit yellow hair.

Lord Shaftesbury asserts that all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of a face; and true proportions the beauty of architecture; as true measures that of harmony and music. In poetry, which is all fable, truth still is the perfection.

It has been with no less truth observed, that homely women are altogether the best at heart, head and soul. A pretty face often presides over a false heart and a weak head, with the smallest shadow of a soul.

"The bombastic misrepresentations of the encomiasts of Beauty," observed Ayton, "have exposed her just claims to much odium and ill-will. If a perfect face is the only bait that can tempt an angel from the skies," he adds, "what is to be the recompense of the unfortunate with a wide mouth and a turn-up nose? The conduct of men, since the deluge, has proved, however, that love (the true thing) is not mere fealty to a face. 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."

In the words of a contemporary:

Woman has never failed, since the world began, to illustrate, in instances, the glory of her nature-never ceased to manifest the divine in the human. With the regal Esther, yearning to bless her enslaved kindred, and the filial-love inspired daughter, who sustained the life of her grey-haired father through a prison's bars, there have not been parallels wanting in all ages, to prove that the angels of God still wander on earth, to remind man of Eden, and give him a foretaste of heaven."

Of such type of virtue, were Penelope, weaving amid her maidens through weary years the web that shielded her virtue until her royal husband returned from his wanderings, and was to gladden her heart; or, courteous Rebecca, at the well; or timid Ruth, gleaning in the field; or, nobler still, the Roman Cornelia, who, taunted in Rome's decaying age by rivals with her poverty, held up her virtuous children, exclaiming "These are my jewels! Fit woman to have been the "mother of the

Gracchi."

Richter observes, a woman's soul is by nature a beautiful fresco-painting, painted on rooms, clothes, silver waiters, and upon the whole domestic establishment."

Beautiful women may be admired, but who can refrain from loving the impersonation of grace and virtue we every day encounter in the charmed circles of domestic life? Love is a hallowed passion; it is angel-like-a gleam of the celestial to gladden the dark places of our earthly pilgrimage.