If the creator of Duncan was right in saying that there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face, then must the author of the Novum Organum have been wrong when he declared that “physiognomy ... discovereth the disposition of the mind by the lineaments of the body;” and these, curiously enough, are parallel passages never quoted by the believers in the theory that Bacon was the writer of Shakspere’s plays.

It is not intended here to enter into a discussion of the merits or demerits of physiognomy. This is an Exhibition of Portraits, not a Phrenological Lecture. I shall try to show how these men and women looked, in life and in death, not why they happened to look as they did; and I shall dwell generally upon their brains, occasionally upon their bones, but only incidentally upon their bumps.

The ancient Romans are said to have made, in wax, casts of the faces of their illustrious dead. These masks are believed to have been colored to represent the originals as they appeared in life, to have been cherished religiously by their descendants through many generations, and, on the occasion of a public and formal funeral, it is thought that they were sometimes worn by professional mourners, as a sort of posthumous tribute from the dead already to the memory of the latest man who had died. And recent explorers have satisfied themselves that in the early burials of many nations it was the custom to cover the heads and bodies of the dead with sheets of gold so pliable that they took the impress of the form; and not infrequently, when in the course of centuries the embalmed flesh had shrivelled or fallen away, the gold retained the exact cast of the features. Schliemann found a number of bodies “covered with large masks of gold-plate in repoussé-work,” several of which have been reproduced by means of engraving, in his Mycenæ; and he asserted that there can be no doubt whatever that each one of these represents the likeness of the deceased person whose face it covered.

When Hamlet said that Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, he overlooked the fact that Alexander’s dust, instead of being converted into loam to stop a beer-barrel, was preserved from corruption by the process of embalming, and from external injury by being cased in the most precious of metals. Pettigrew, in his History of Egyptian Mummies, said of the death-mask of Alexander that “it was a sort of chase-work, and of such a nature that it could be applied so closely to the skin as to preserve not only the form of the body, but also to give the expression of the features to the countenance.” He did not quote his authority for this statement, but it is unquestionably derived from the account of the death and burial of Alexander written by Diodorus Siculus, who said: “And first a coffin of beaten gold was provided, so wrought by the hammer as to answer to the proportions of the body; it was half filled with aromatic spices, which served as well to delight the sense as to prevent the body from putrefaction.” Then follows a description of the funeral chariot, and of the long line of march from Babylon to Alexandria, where Augustus Cæsar saw the tomb three hundred years later; but there is no reference to a mask of Alexander’s face in gold. It is greatly to be regretted that such a mask does not exist now, that it might be compared with the plaster masks of Cromwell, Washington, Frederick the Great, Bonaparte, Grant, and Sherman, and other conquerors of later days here presented to the public scrutiny.

Among the gold mummy-masks exhibited in the Museum of the Louvre is one, as Mr. John C. Van Dyke points out, which bears a curious and striking resemblance not only to Washington, but to the familiar portraits of Greuze, the painter. It is No. 536 of the Egyptian Collection, and bears a card with the following inscription: “Masque de Momie trouvé dans le chambre d’Apis consacré par le Prince Kha-Em-Onas.”

In the collection of antiques presented to the museum at Naples by Prince Corignano is a wax mask with glass eyes. It was found with four decapitated bodies in a tomb at Cumæ, and it is evidently a portrait of the original, who is said to have been a Christian martyr. And Mr. W. M. Flynders Petrie exhibited in London, in the autumn of 1892, an exceedingly interesting collection of antiquities brought from Tel-el-Amarna, the Arab name for the ancient city of Khuenaten, situated about one hundred and eighty miles south of Cairo. That city was built about fourteen hundred years before Christ, by Khuenaten, son of Amenhotep III., who made it the centre of his proposed great revolution in religion, art, and ethics. The collection comprised, among other things, a cast from the head of Khuenaten himself, taken after death, according to Mr. Petrie, for the use of the sculptor who was preparing the sarcophagus for his tomb. These are among the earliest examples of death-masks which have come down to us.

At least three copies of the Dante mask, all believed to be authentic, are known to be in existence. First, that which is called the Torrigiani cast, which can be traced back to 1750; second, the so-called Seymour Kirkup mask, given to him by the sculptor Bartolini, who is said to have found it in Ravenna; and third, a mask belonging, according to Kirkup, to “the late sculptor Professor Ricci.” “The slight differences between these,” adds Kirkup, “are such as might occur in casts made from the original mask.” Concerning the original mask itself, says Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, there is no trustworthy history to be obtained. On the very threshold of his inquiry into the matter he was met with the doubt whether the art of taking casts was practised at the time of Dante’s death at all, Vasari, in his life of Andrea del Verocchio, who flourished in the middle of the fifteenth century, having declared that the art first came into use in Verocchio’s day. It is certain that there is no record of the Dante mask for three hundred years after Dante died; but it is equally certain that it resembles nearly all the portraits of Dante down to the time of Raphael. Mr. Norton believes, from external evidence, that it is, at all events, a death-mask of some one; and of this, it seems to me, there can be no question.

There are two masks of Dante now on public exhibition in Florence. One is in the house built upon the site of the mansion in which Dante was born; the other is in a small cabinet adjoining the Hall of the Hermaphrodite in the Uffizi Gallery. The former is a cast of the face only, and it bears every evidence of recent construction. The latter is a cast in plaster of the head and shoulders, and is one of the masks of which Mr. Norton speaks. It has, unfortunately, been painted, the face a flesh color, the cap and gown red, the waistcoat and the tabs over the ears green; but it is undoubtedly a very early cast from the mould made from the actual head. It bears the following inscription, “Effigie di Dante Alighieri, Maschera Formata sul di lui Cadavere in Ravenna l’Anno 1321,” and to it is attached a card saying that it was bequeathed to the Museum by the Marquis Torrigiani in 1865. It is here reproduced.

“Why keep you your eyes closed, Signor Torquato?” said a watcher at the death-bed of Tasso—one of those silly persons who ask silly questions, even under the most serious circumstances—“Why keep you your eyes closed?” “That they may grow accustomed to remain closed,” was the feeble reply. They have been closed to all mortal vision for three hundred years now, but in the pale, cold plaster of the accompanying mask his face is still seen as it was seen by the vast and sorrowing multitudes who lined the streets of Rome to look upon his triumphant funeral procession. His body was clad in an antique toga, kindled tapers lighted his way, and his pallid brow was at last encircled by the wreath of laurel he had waited for so long. And thus at the end of the Nineteenth Century do we, in the New World, look upon the cast of the actual face of the great poet of the Old World who died at the end of the century he adorned. The original mask is preserved, with other personal relics of Tasso, in the room of the convent of San Onofrio, in which he died. But the great powder explosion which shook all Rome a few years ago so shattered this part of the convent that the room and the mask are no longer shown to the public.

The personal appearance of Tasso has been carefully and minutely described by his friend and biographer Manso. His broad forehead was high and inclined to baldness; his thin hair was of a lighter color than that of his countrymen generally; his eyes were large, dark blue, and set wide apart; his eyebrows were black and arched; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was wide; his lips were thin; and his beard was thick and of a reddish-brown tinge.

Tasso went from Naples to Rome to receive from the hands of the Pope the crown of bay which had been worn by Petrarch and other laureates of Italy; and he died upon the day set apart for his coronation.

The head of Shakspere here presented, from the monumental bust in the chancel of the church at Stratford, like everything else relating to Shakspere, in life or in death, is shrouded in mystery. It is supposed to be the work of one Gerard Johnson, and to have been “cut from a death-mask” shortly after Shakspere’s funeral. The earliest allusion to it is to be found in a poem of Leonard Digges, written seven years later. It was certainly in existence during the lifetime of Anne Hathaway Shakspere, and of other members of his family, who would, perhaps, have objected or protested if the likeness had not been considered a good one. Sir Francis Chantrey believed it to have been worked from a cast of the living or the dead face. “There are in the original in the church,” he wrote, “marks of individuality which are not to be observed in the usual casts from it; for instance, the markings about the eyes, the wrinkles on the forehead, and the undercutting from the moustachios.” Wordsworth, among others, accepted its authenticity, and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps did not hesitate to put himself on record, more than once, as having every faith in its superiority, in the matter of actual resemblance, to any of the alleged portraits. He ranked it, in point of authority, before the Droeshout print, endorsed by Ben Jonson as perfect; and he called attention to the general resemblance to be traced between them.

It certainly differs in many respects from the famous plaster cast found in a curiosity-shop in Germany some years ago, and known as the Kesselstadt mask, a photograph of which is here reproduced. This mask is believed, by those who believe in it at all, to have been made from Shakspere’s dead face, to have been carried to Germany by a German envoy to England in the reign of James I., to have been cherished as an authentic and valuable relic for many generations, to have been sold for rubbish at the death of the last of the race, and to have been recovered in a most fortuitous way. It bears upon its back the date of Shakspere’s death, 1616, it has been the subject of more discussion than any piece of plaster of its size in the world, and even those who believe that it is not Shakspere have never asserted that it is Bacon!

According to Mr. G. Huntley Gordon, this cast from the Stratford bust was taken about 1845, stealthily and in the middle of the night, by a young Stratford plasterer, who was frightened by imaginary noises before he succeeded in getting a mould of the entire head. After the protest raised against Malone for whitewashing the bust in 1793, the authorities, naturally, had put an embargo upon any handling of the monument, and the operation was fraught with much risk to the aspiring youth who undertook it. A cast is known to have been taken for Malone, however, and since then other casts have been made by other artists, notably one by George Bullock, who made the death-mask of Scott.

Next to the Stratford bust, the sculptured portrait of Shakspere most familiar to the world is that which stands in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. The artist went to some strange source for the likeness, and although it was for gentle Shakspere cut, by no means does it outdo the life. “I saw old Samuel Johnson,” said Cumberland, describing Garrick’s funeral—“I saw old Samuel Johnson standing at the foot of Shakspere’s monument, and bathed in tears.” Burke on that occasion remarked that the statue of Shakspere looked towards Garrick’s grave; and on this stray hint, as Mr. Brander Matthews believes, Sheridan hung his famous couplet in the Monody:

Garrick’s face, it is said, was wonderfully under control, and his features had a marvellous flexibility, which rendered variety and rapid change of expression an easy matter. The story of his having frightened Hogarth by standing before him as the ghost of Fielding, assuming the appearance of the dead novelist in all the fixedness and rigidity of death, has often been told. There are many original portraits of Garrick in existence. The Garrick Club in London possesses at least a dozen, while The Players in New York own two by Zoffany, and one by Reynolds.

A not uncommon print, entitled “The Mask of Garrick taken from the Face after Death,” is in the Shaksperian Library at Stratford-upon-Avon, and it is to be found in Evans’s “Catalogue of Engraved Portraits.” It does not seem, however, to be the portrait of a dead man, being full of living expression, and it is, perhaps, an enlarged reproduction of the face in the miniature by Pine of Bath, now in the Garrick Club, the eyes having the same dilatation of pupil which was characteristic of the great actor.

The mask here shown was purchased in 1876 from the late Mr. Marshall, the antiquarian dealer in Stratford, who possessed what he believed to be its pedigree written in pencil on the back of the plaster, and now unfortunately defaced. He asserted that it was taken from life, and that it had come by direct descent from the sculptor’s hands into his. There is a replica of it in the Shakspere Museum at Stratford, but no history is attached to it, and the trustees know nothing about it, except that it was “the gift of the late Miss Wheeler.” It resembles very strongly the familiar portrait of Garrick by Hogarth, the original of which hangs in one of the bedrooms of Windsor Castle.

In a very early cast of the Garrick mask, still existing in London, the texture of the skin proves conclusively that it was taken from nature, and most probably from life.

In the “Guild Hall” of “The City of Lushington,” an ancient and very unique social club, which has met for many years in a dark and dingy little back room connected with the Harp Tavern, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, London, are still preserved the chair of Edmund Kean, the hole in the wall made by the quart pot he threw once, in a fit of gross insubordination, at a former “Lord Mayor,” and what is religiously considered by all the citizens of Lushington to be a death-mask of Kean himself. This cast is covered with glass and with dust and its history is lost in the mists of time. There is no record of it in the metropolitan archives, the corporation will not permit it to be reproduced, even by photography, and it bears but little resemblance to Kean, or to the mask in my possession, which also has no history, but which I believe to be authentic, and which is certainly very like the sketch of Kean done in oils by George Clint, and now in the possession of Mr. Henry Irving. This hurried sketch of Clint’s is said to be the only portrait for which Kean could be induced to sit. It was made in Kean’s bedroom in a few hours, and it is the groundwork of more than one finished portrait of the same subject by the same artist. The portrait of Kean by Neagle, now the property of The Players, has a similar tradition.

The Lushington cast is perhaps an early life-mask of the elder Kean, perhaps a life-mask, or a death-mask, of the younger Kean, more probably the mask of some defunct and commonplace and now forgotten mayor or alderman of Lushington, who did not even look like Kean.

The eye-witnesses of Kean’s theatrical performances were generally so much impressed by the force of his acting that they paid little attention to his personal appearance. We read in Leslie’s Autobiography that “he had an amazing power of expression in his face,” and “that his face, although not handsome, was picturesque;” a writer in the New Monthly Magazine in 1833 spoke of him as “a small man with an Italian face and fatal eye;” a writer in Blackwood, a few years later, called him “a man of low and meagre figure, of a Jewish physiognomy, and a stifled and husky voice;” while Miss Fanny Kemble said that “he possessed particular physical qualifications; an eye like an orb of light; a voice exquisitely touching and melodious in its tendencies, but in the harsh dissonance of vehement passion terribly true.” Barry Cornwall, in his poor Life of Kean, spoke of “his thin, dark face, full of meaning, taking, at every turn, a sinister or vigilant expression,” and as being “just adapted to the ascetic and revengeful Shylock.” And Henry Crabb Robinson said in 1814, “Kean’s face is finely expressive, though his mouth is not handsome, and he projects his lower lip ungracefully.”

The portrait of Kean by Helen Faucit, Lady Martin, is the best that has been presented to us. She met him once on the Green at Richmond when she was a child, and he a broken-down old man. “I was startled, frightened at what I saw,” she wrote: “a small pale man with a fur cap, and wrapped in a fur cloak. He looked to me as if come from the grave. A stray lock of very dark hair crossed his forehead, under which shone eyes which looked dark, and yet bright as lamps. So large were they, so piercing, so absorbing, I could see no other features.... Oh, what a voice was that which spoke! It seemed to come from far away—a long, long way behind him. After the first salutation, it said, ‘Who is this little one?’ When my sister had explained, the face smiled; I was reassured by the smile, and the face looked less terrible.”

Among the English-speaking actors of later days few have been better known and better liked, in America at all events, than John McCullough, Dion Boucicault, Lawrence Barrett, Henry Edwards, and Edwin Booth, the faces of all of whom I am able to present here. John McCullough, the first of this galaxy of stars to quit the stage of life, was a man of strong and attractive personality, if not a great actor; he had many admirers in his profession and many friends out of it. The cloak which Forrest dropped fell upon his shoulders, and in such parts as Virginius, Damon, and the Brutus of John Howard Payne, it was nobly worn. He was as modest, as simple, and as manly in character as are the characters he represented on the stage. Unhappily, mental disease preceded McCullough’s death, and during the last few years of his life those who loved him best prayed for the rest which is here shown on his face. The post-mortem examination revealed a brain of unusual size and of very high development. The death-mask was made by Mr. H. H. Kitson, of Boston.

Dion Boucicault, worn by age, died in the city of New York in the early autumn of 1890. He was one of the most remarkably versatile men of the century. He was a fairly good actor, an excellent stage-manager, an ingenious stage-machinist, an admirable judge of plays and of the capacities of the men about him, the most entertaining of companions, a man of quick wit, of restless personality, and the author and adapter, perhaps, of more dramatic productions, good and bad, than any man who ever lived. The cast of the head of Boucicault was made the day after his death, by Mr. J. Scott Hartley, of New York.

Of the masks of Lawrence Barrett and of Henry Edwards I can hardly trust myself to speak here or yet. My personal friendship with them was so intimate, my affection so strong, and their taking away so recent, that I can only look upon the casts of their dead faces as I looked upon the dead faces themselves a few months ago, and grieve afresh for what I have lost.

Mr. William Winter, who knew Barrett long and well, has spoken of “his stately head silvered during the last few years with graying hair, of his dark eyes deeply sunken and glowing with intense light, of his thin visage paled with study and with pain, of his form of grace, and of his voice of sonorous eloquence and solemn music, one of the few great voices of this present dramatic generation in its compass, variety, and sweetness. His head was a grand head; his face beautiful in its spirit, its bravery, and its strength.” As the Rev. John A. Chadwick finely said of him in the Christian Register, “The noblest part he ever acted was the part of Lawrence Barrett—an honest, brave, and kindly gentleman.”

Mr. Barrett was one of the little party who were with Mr. Booth when the idea of The Players was first conceived, and who helped their friend, the Founder, to bring that association to its present perfected state. Mr. Barrett was one of its legal incorporators; from the beginning until his death he was a member of its governing body, and he was always enthusiastic in his devotion to it, and to the objects for which Mr. Booth had endowed it. At the annual celebration of the club, held upon what is called “Founder’s Night,” December 31, 1890, Mr. Barrett read aloud, and with a great deal of feeling, in the club-house, Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s touching poem upon Mr. John S. Sargent’s portrait of Mr. Booth, and it was noticed by many present that his voice faltered when he spoke of

He was himself the first of those present to go to the Land of Shadows. That his gentle spirit haunts the place, and will haunt it pleasantly for many years to come, not one who knew and loved him there can for a moment doubt.

Henry Edwards was not only an actor but a man of science. He was recognized as a distinguished entomologist by many persons on both sides of the Atlantic who had never even heard of his theatrical career. He left a magnificent collection of butterflies, now preserved in one of the leading museums of America, and he contributed to the press of both countries a number of valuable books and pamphlets upon the subject he loved. His work upon the stage was uniformly good. As Mr. Winter said of him, in a funeral oration, he did not astonish and dazzle; he satisfied. He excelled in the representation of rough pathos, of bluff good-humor, and of honest indignation. He had a frank, expressive, cheerful face and a hearty voice. He was a man of genuine, healthy honesty and simplicity, who left behind him many warmly attached friends. He was sympathetic and always interested in anything that interested the men about him. Many a time has he studied, discussed, and moralized over, the collection which now, alas! contains the cast of his own dead face. The mask was made by Mr. J. Scott Hartley.

A death-mask of Booth was taken under the direction of Mr. Augustus St. Gaudens. Although there is about it nothing which is distressing or unpleasant, his family and his friends prefer to have it withheld from the public gaze. The life-mask which, by the courtesy of The Players, prefaces this volume, was made by Mr. John Rogers in 1864, when Booth was in the thirtieth year of his age, and in the zenith of his strength and his beauty.