CHARLEMAGNE, MILTON. 499 that he was accustomed to pray in that language as well as in his native tongue. The Greek, however, we are told, he could understand better than pronounce it. He cultivated the liberal arts most studiously, and loaded with honours those who taught them. His teacher in grammar was Peter of Pisa; in his other studies he listened to Albinus, called Alcuinus, the Saxon, a deacon from Britain. Under him he devoted much time to the acquiring of rhetoric, and dialectics, and astronomy. He attempted also to write, and for this purpose he carried about with him in his bed, under his pillow, tablets and little books, so that when he had leisure he might accustom his hand in forming the letters. But this labour, says Eginhart, compassionately, unseasonable and late begun,' succeeded but indifferently. The affectionate secretary enlarges on the Emperor's works of piety and almsgiving, mentioning that he corrected the reading and singing in the churches, though he himself neither read nor sung in public, but in a low voice, and in common with the rest of the congregation.' There is certainly no lack of particulars here, collected though they be almost exclusively from two books-those about Julius Cæsar from Suetonius, and those about Charlemagne from Eginhart. There is a want of the true portrait-painter's skill, however, in the arrangement and management of the particulars. The two portraits,-that of the tall, pale, lean, black-eyed, epileptic Roman; and that of the large, portly, white-haired, ruddyvisaged, weak-voiced, emperor of the Franks-do not stand forth with that distinctness and force of mutual contrast which, with greater strength of stroke on the part of the describer, might have been attained in less space. Indeed, we believe the portraits would have been better if Mr. Bruce, instead of attempting descriptions in his own words, had given us literal translations, in proper order, of the passages in Suetonius and Eginhart on which his descriptions are founded. Literality, closeness, pictorial precision, is in such cases all in all. It is astonishing how few particulars, if accurately noted, will serve to convey a distinct impression of a man's personal appearance and habits. Take, for example, the following brief description of Milton in his old age, given by the novelist Richardson from the report of a friend of his: 'An aged clergyman of Dorsetshire found John Milton (in his house in Artillery Walk) in a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale, but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk-stones. He used to sit in a gray coarse cloth coat at the door of his house in Bunhill Fields, in warm weather, to enjoy the fresh air; and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people, of distinguished parts, as well as quality.' Hundreds of such personal sketches of remarkable men are to be found scattered through books, ready to be collected by whoever will take the trouble; there always having been men who, possessing the instinctive knack of observing such particulars respecting the faces, &c., of those with whom they came in contact, had also the wit to set them down for the information of others. Suetonius and Plutarch among the ancients are capital in this way; and among later books, the Diaries of Pepys, and Boswell's Life of Johnson, can never be praised enough. In the best modern historical works, as we have already said, portraitpainting is carried almost to the perfection of an art. With what ease and skill does Goethe in his Autobiography reproduce for us the living figures of the Mercks and Herders, and other remarkable individuals who influenced his culture in early life; and how painstaking is Mr. Carlyle with the countenances of his Mirabeaus, Robespierres, and other celebrities; as if it were a sin (which it is) for a historian to permit his reader to fancy a swarthy man doing an action which the destinies had appointed to be performed by a man with barley-sugar-coloured hair. Some men, however, have no eye for these concrete details. There are persons one meets with in society who, if they are telling you something of a Mr. A or a Mr. B, whom you have never seen, cannot, for the life of them, tell you whether he had a high forehead or a low forehead, whether he wore a brown coat with cloth buttons, or a blue coat with brass buttons, whether he was sitting or standing at the time, whether it was in a field of oats on a Saturday evening, or in his pew at church next Sunday morning that he said or did what they are reporting of him. Provoking in private society, these persons would be intolerable in history; and they ought to be prevented from writing it by Act of Parliament. Viewed otherwise than as the results of a mere natural taste for the picturesque and the anecdotic, all those attempts at the detailed description of the physiognomies and personal habits of remarkable men with which ancient and modern books abound, may be regarded as contributions to, and strainings after, a possible science-the science of the external indications, or visible signs, of mind and character. It is not an indifferent thing whether a man has black hair or barley-sugar-coloured hair, a brown coat or a blue coat; whether he speaks fast or slowly, in a deep or in a shrill voice; whether, when he is at ease in his chair, he leans his head on his elbow, or sits twirling his thumbs; or whether he dines entirely on vegetables, or likes roast meat. There are correspondences and connexions which relate everything in and about man to everything else in and about him; so that by having hair of this or that colour, by twirling his thumbs or by sitting still, a man is, as it were, differenced from all others PHYSIOGNOMIC SCIENCE. 501 not only by that particular, but by an infinite host of correspondences with that particular extending to the very depths of his being. This is the law, and its applications are innumerable. Man and woman, for example, were they precisely alike in all other respects, whether of nature or of training, are yet decisively differenced from each other by this one fact,-that those corporeal proportions which are in man as three to two, are in woman as two to three. It matters not that we know not what the ensemble of the differences are which this one difference denotes; that is to say, it may matter in social practice, but it does not matter in scientific theory. And so, with men as compared with men, and women as compared with women-every particular, physiological or personal, has correspondences with, and may be taken as symbolical of, the whole being. There have been, as all know, a hundred rude attempts to construct sciences of character out of this principle. It is more than two thousand years since Euripides made Medea, in her wrath, cry out: Ω Ζεύ, τι δη χρυσοῦ μεν, ὡς κιβδηλος ᾖ, O Jove, of gold that is adulterate, Is there no mark birth-stamped upon the body? There were contemporaries of Euripides who would have informed him that Medea's complaint was unfounded, and that, if she had taken pains to look a little more closely at Jason before running away with him, she would have found a very distinct χαρακτηρ marked upon his σωμα. The Greeks, in their various literature, had express treatises on the physiognomic art. Aristotle himself is believed to have written a treatise of this kind, still extant; and there is a German edition of the collected remains of Greek writers on Physiognomy. In modern times curiosity has prompted all sorts of efforts in the same direction, and now we have some half-dozen mongrel sciences of the signs of character circulating in drawing-rooms, amusing the ladies, and serving as a means of chit-chat to ignorant young men, and a means of money-making to quacks. First, and most respectable of all, both in its origin and its following, is the so-called science of phrenology, more properly craniology, which professes to diagnose character from the shape of the skull. Then we have the nose-science, in which noses are classified into aquiline, Grecian, snub, or celestial, and various other kinds; and a man's character is thus diagnosed in a very literal sense. Napoleon is claimed as a believer in this science; he used to say, 'Give me a man with plenty of nose. Then we have the science of palmistry, the most recent development of which is the Thumb-science, according to which thumbs are classified, and their wearers with them. The grand distinction of thumbs, we believe, is into the Platonic thumb, in which the nail curves upwards, indicating an affection for the Platonic method of thought, and the Aristotelian thumb, which is flat, and indicates an Aristotelian or descendental turn of mind. Then there is the jaw-science, the tenets of which, however, are not numerous, being chiefly confined to the very sound maxim, that a strong jaw is preferable to a weak one. In short, not to mention graphiology, or the science of handwriting, there is probably not a single part or member of the body that has not been made the seat of a science. Any fool who will start up to-morrow and profess a science for telling character from the shape of the knee, will find followers and patients. All these mongrel sciences, however, err only, where they do err, in being too hasty and empirical applications of the undeniable scientific truth, that everything in and about a man has a correspondence with and is significant of, everything else in and about him. That there is a possible science of physiognomy, in the largest sense of that word, as referring not only to the face and head, but to every part of the body, no one can deny. Had we intellect enough we could infer a man completely from a piece of his skin, or from the sound of his voice. An archangel could construct a man completely, and know all that he was capable of, from a paring of his nail-the quality and size of the paring indicating something about the nature of the tissue with which it was connected, this again indicating something else, and so on, till the whole body was thoroughly imagined, which body could not stand associated with any other than such and such mental manifestations. Such a science of physiognomy as man, in his comparative ignorance, can ever hope to realize, must fall far short of this; and must be built up of observations of an empirical kind, referring not to one part of the body, but to as many parts as possible, those parts being, of course, selected for particular observation which there is reason to think are more emphatically significant. In the treatise on Physiognomics, attributed to Aristotle, so far as we have looked into it, this method is pursued; and we dare say it contains empirical observations of some value as to relations of heads, chests, beards, complexions, and the like, among the Greeks, to mind and character. The good Lavater, the chief apostle of physiognomic science in modern times, also seems to have set to work the right way, regarding all the parts and all the attitudes of the body as possessing significance, though POINTS TO BE ATTENDED TO. 503 necessarily the face and head were most to be attended to; and yet, with all Lavater's practice, such science as he attained seems to have amounted to nothing more than an empirical knack, and to have perished with him. His work on physiognomy is remarkably destitute of precise results. We have said that, though everything about a man must necessarily be considered as significant of the whole man, yet there are certain things about him which are more emphatically significant, and from which it is practically easier to predicate something respecting his character than from others. All our personal descriptions of men recognise this fact. There are certain items that enter into every description of this kind that is considered a good one; and a description of this kind is considered a success or a failure according as the items are well or ill selected. Supposing that, with a view to the preparation of our ideal dictionary of ancient and modern physiognomies, we were to draw up a schedule of those points' about a man regarding which we should desire information, either for the mere satisfaction of biographic curiosity, or for ulterior treatment as material for a science of the corporeal signs of character, it cannot be doubted that we should be right in including in such a schedule the following particulars:-size, stature, and form; complexion, including what is called temperament; size and form of the head; features of the face, especially the eyes, nose, mouth, jaw, and beard; voice and pronunciation; characteristic attitude or gesture; and degree and kind of liability to disease. Here, if corporeal particulars only were to be included, the schedule might stop. For biographical purposes, however, it ought to be extended, by the addition, for example, of the following particulars:-dress, household habits, and diurnal routine of occupation; temper and degree of sociability; background of most characteristic circumstance (the meaning of which phrase we will presently explain); favourite sayings, anecdotes, quotations, and authors. We will go over these particulars shortly one by one, altering, however, a little, the order in which they have just been enumerated. It would be useless, for example, to look for a gentleman's characteristic attitude or gesture before we had put on his dress. 1. It is desirable that, in personal delineations of eminent men, we should have as accurate information as possible regarding their size, stature, and corporeal figure. The imagination, in reading history or biography, ought, first of all, distinctly to know whether it is dealing with a big or with a little man; and omission of information on this point is a biographic fault of the first magnitude. We would even, if possible, have all eminent men weighed by public authority. A table of the comparative weights of re |