The best and most sympathetic portrait of John Boyle O’Reilly is the following, to be found in the life of that gentleman written by his friend, Mr. James Jeffrey Roche: “Recalling him as he then was [1870], the abiding memory of him is that of his marvellously sweet smile, and his strikingly clear and frank gaze; the beauty of his face lay chiefly in his eyes. The official advertisement of his escape says that those eyes were brown, and prison descriptions are generally more accurate than flattering. Almost anybody looking at him less closely, would have said that his eyes were black. As a matter of fact, they were hazel, but his dark skin and jet-black eyebrows and hair gave an impression of blackness to the large, well-formed eyes beneath. They were very expressive, whether flashing with some sudden fancy or glowing with a deeper burning thought, or sparkling with pure boyish fun. There was another expression, which they sometimes wore at this period of his life, and which may be described for lack of a better word, as a hunted look—not frightened or furtive, but an alert, watchful expression, which made it easy to understand how he could have deliberately armed himself with the firm intention of surrendering his liberty only with his life.... No portrait ever made of him does justice to that which was the great charm of his countenance—its wonderful light and life. His eyes had the depth and fire and mobile color of glowing carbuncle. For the rest he had the rich brown complexion, so familiar in after-years; a small black mustache, only half concealing his finely-cut mouth, and revealing a set of perfectly white, regular teeth. His form was slight, but erect and soldier-like. He carried his head well raised, and a little thrown back. He was a man whom no one would pass without a second glance.”

It is rather a curious fact that the men most interested, naturally, in the study of the human face, and in its portrayal with chisel or pencil, are the men most poorly represented in this collection; Sir Thomas Lawrence being the only painter of portraits, and Hiram Powers, Haydon, and Canova the only makers of masks, whose masks are here presented. Three views of the life-mask of Sir Thomas Lawrence were engraved by R. J. Lane, in 1830. They are contained on one plate, and represent the full face, as well as profiles looking to the right and to the left. The print is very rare, and bears the following inscription: “From a plaster cast taken at the age of thirty-four, in the possession of an attached friend.”

Edward H. Baily, the sculptor, is known to have made a cast of Lawrence’s features after death. “The head was finely shaped and bald, and it bore a striking resemblance to that of Canning, although the face lacked something of Canning’s elevated expression.” This death-mask is here presented.

Lawrence is said to have been a beautiful creature in his boyhood, with bright eyes, and long chestnut hair. In later life we are told that “although not tall—he was under five feet nine inches—his beautiful face, active figure, agreeable manners, and fine voice were not thrown away upon either lords or ladies, emperors or kings.” Opie said of him once, “Lawrence made coxcombs of his sitters, and his sitters made a coxcomb of him.” And George IV., the Sir Hubert Stanley of fine manners, pronounced him “a high-bred gentleman.” This is praise indeed! Another, and perhaps not so exalted an authority, said, “Lawrence’s appearance was exceedingly graceful and gentlemanly. His countenance was open and noble, his eyes were large and lustrous and very expressive.” Dr. R. R. Madden, in his Memoirs of the Countess of Blessington, quotes a brother artist, and a friend of Lawrence, as saying of him, “As a man Sir Thomas Lawrence was amiable, kind, generous, and forgiving. His manner was elegant but not high-bred. He had too much the air of always submitting. He had smiled so often, and so long, that at last his smile had the appearance of being set in enamel.”

The mask of J. M. W. Turner formerly belonged to the late Dr. Pocock of Brighton, England, and is now in the possession of Mr. William Ward, of London. It was made, after death, by the late Thomas Woolner. There are but few portraits of Turner in existence, the most life-like being an engraving by M. M. Halloway, of a half-length profile sketch bearing this inscription: “Drawn by me in the print-room of the British Museum. J. T. Smith.” Unfortunately no date is attached.

Much has been put on record about Turner’s personal peculiarities and eccentricities; but little has been said by his contemporaries concerning his personal appearance. The best picture, although a slight one, is from the pen of Mr. W. P. Frith: “Turner was a very short man, with a large head, and a face usually much muffled to protect it from the draughts for which the rooms [of the Royal Academy] were celebrated.”

Cyrus Redding, in his Past Celebrities, speaks of Turner’s “unprepossessing exterior, his reserve, and his austerity of language.” Wilkie Collins once described him as seated on the top of a flight of steps, astride of a box, on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy, “a shabby Bacchus, nodding like a mandarin at his picture, which he with a pendulum-motion now touched with his brush, now receded from.” And Peter Cunningham, in an almost brutal way, set down Turner as “short, stout, and bandy-legged, with a red, pimply face, imperious and covetous eyes, and a tongue which expressed his sentiments with murmuring reluctance.” Sir William Allen, according to Cunningham, was accustomed to describe the great painter as a “Dutch Skipper.”

In view of all this, it is not remarkable that Turner had strong objections to sitting for his portrait. He felt that any familiarity with his face and figure would affect the poetry of his works in the popular mind. “No one,” he said, “would believe, after seeing my likeness, that I painted these pictures.” A contemporary portrait of Turner, fishing in all his uncouth enthusiasm, with shabby garments, and a cotton umbrella over his head, is unfortunately too long to be quoted here.

Hiram Powers died in Florence in 1873, and lies in the Protestant Cemetery of that city. His mask, after death, was made by Thomas Ball and Joel T. Hart. Dr. Samuel Osgood said of Powers in 1870: “In his looks, his ideas, as well as in all his works, he is a man of the golden mean. There is nothing too much in his make or his manner. He is a good specimen of a well-formed man, and his own statue would make a good sign for the front of his studio.” In October, 1847, Mrs. Browning wrote: “Mr. Powers, the sculptor, is our chief friend and favorite. A most charming, simple, straightforward, genial American—as simple as the man of genius he has proved himself to be.... The sculptor has eyes like a wild Indian’s, so black and full of light—you would scarcely marvel if they clove the marble without the help of his hand.” “Mr. Powers called in the evening,” wrote Hawthorne in his Italian Note-book in 1858—“a plain personage, characterized by strong simplicity and warm kindliness, with an impending brow, and large eyes which kindle as he speaks. He is gray and slightly bald, but does not seem elderly nor past his prime. I accept him at once as an honest and trustworthy man, and shall not vary from this judgment.”

Mr. Preston Powers, who possesses the mask of his father, has also in his possession a life-mask and a death-mask of Agassiz, and a death-mask of Sumner; the last two having been made by himself. Through his courtesy I am enabled to reproduce them all here.

The life-mask of Agassiz was made when the subject was about forty years of age, and by an artist now unknown. It was given to Mr. Powers by Mr. Alexander Agassiz at the time of the elder Agassiz’s death.

E. P. Whipple, in his Recollections of Eminent Men, said of Agassiz: “You could not look at him without feeling that you were in the presence of a magnificent specimen of physical, mental, and moral manhood; that in him was realized Sainte-Beuve’s ideal of a scientist—the soul of a sage in the body of an athlete. At that time [1845] he was one of the comeliest of men. His full and ruddy face, glowing with health and animation, was crowned by a brow which seemed to be the fit home for such a comprehensive intelligence.” And Longfellow, in his Journal (January 9, 1847), wrote: “In the evening a reunion at Felton’s to meet Mr. Agassiz, the Swiss geologist and naturalist. A pleasant, voluble man, with a bright beaming face.”

Mr. Curtis, in an oration upon Charles Sumner, delivered shortly after the statesman’s death, said that “his look, his walk, his dress, his manner, were not those of the busy advocate, even in his younger years, but of the cultivated and brilliant man of society, the Admirable Crichton of the saloons.”

Mrs. Jefferson Davis, in her Life of her husband, spoke of Sumner as “a handsome, unpleasing man, and an athlete whose physique proclaimed his physical strength.” And Mr. Seward wrote to his wife in 1856: “Sumner is much changed for the worse. His elasticity and vigor are gone. He walks, and in every way moves, like a man who has not altogether recovered from a paralysis, or like a man whose sight is dimmed, and his limbs stiffened with age.”

At the autopsy it was discovered that the brain of Sumner showed no trace of the assault from the effects of which he suffered so terribly.

Canova must have been a beautiful character. It is not often that so much good is spoken, even of the dead, as has been spoken of him since he died; and if the chroniclers are right, he deserved it all. In personal appearance, however, we read that he was not particularly attractive. His hair was black and luxuriant, and his forehead of noble dimensions, but the outline of his features was neither grand nor extraordinary. The phrenologists gave him a massive brain upward and forward of the ears, wonderful constructive talent, with large ideality and strong intellect. He was very abstemious in his habits, very thoughtful, and a hard worker. Count Cicognara, in a biographical sketch of Canova, thus described his face during his very last hours: “His visage became, and remained for some time, highly radiant and expressive, as if his mind was absorbed in some sublime conception, creating powerful and unusual emotion in all around him. Thus he must have looked when imagining that venerable figure of the pontiff who is represented in the attitude of prayer in the Vatican. His death was wholly unattended by the agonies which make a death-bed so distressing, nor did even a sigh or convulsion announce his dying moment.”

This is the visage which his friends cast in plaster, and it was, no doubt, the basis of the medallion bust of Canova, in profile, which forms part of the pyramidal tomb erected by certain of his pupils in 1827, in the church of Sante Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, the pantheon of Venice. The monument, according to Mr. Ruskin, is “consummate in science, intolerable in affectation, ridiculous in conception; null and void to the uttermost in invention and feeling;” and the medallion represents the great sculptor in all his glorious prime of strength and beauty.

The death-mask of Canova, as here reproduced, in its peaceful and quiet repose, is in strong contrast with that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, shown upon a subsequent page.

In the whole history of English letters, there can be found no sadder chapter than that which contains the story of Sheridan’s death. The body out of which the breath was fast going, and from which intelligent action had entirely gone, was seized by sheriff’s officers for debt, and only by the threats of attending physicians did it escape being carried to a low sponging-house, wrapped in nothing but the blankets that covered the bed on which it lay. The “life and succor” his friends had begged were denied him, and “Westminster Abbey and a funeral” were all he received. As a French journal said at the time, it only proved that “France is the place for a man of letters to live in, and England the place for him to die in.” Sheridan’s appearance during his last hours was thus depicted by one who saw for himself the havoc made: “His countenance was distorted under the writhings of unutterable anguish. Pain and the effects of pain were visible on that sunken cheek; and on that brow which had never knitted under oppression, or frowned upon the importunities of the unfortunate, pain in its most acute form had contracted there its harsh and forbidding lines.... Still, amid those rigid lines which continuous suffering had indented there, you might perceive the softer and more harmonious tracings of uncomplaining patience, fortitude in its endurance, and resignation in its calmness.” This is the face exhibited here—one of the most unpleasant to look upon which the collection contains, notwithstanding Sheridan’s own boast, not very long before his death, that “his eyes would look up as brightly at his coffin-lid as ever.” His spirits did not fail him so long as consciousness remained, and when asked by the attending surgeons if he had ever before undergone an operation, he replied, “Only when sitting for my portrait, or having my hair cut.” It is to be regretted that this last portrait for which he sat, should be so worn and weary in its expression. Moore, in his Life of Sheridan, did not mention the taking of the mask, although he spoke of the plaster cast of Sheridan’s hand, under which some keen observer had written:

Concerning Moore’s own appearance, Leigh Hunt wrote: “Moore’s forehead was bony and full of character, with ‘bumps’ of wit large and radiant enough to transport a phrenologist. His eyes were as dark and fine as you would wish to see under a set of vine leaves; his mouth generous, and good-humored with dimples.” Scott said in his Journal, in 1825: “Moore’s countenance is plain, but the expression is very animated, especially in speaking or singing, so that it is far more interesting than the finest features could have rendered it.” In 1833 Gerald Griffin made a visit to Moore at Sloperton, and thus described Moore himself: “A little man, but full of spirits, with eyes, hands, feet, and frame forever in motion.... I am no great observer of proportions, but he seemed to me to be a neat-made little fellow, tidily buttoned up, young as fifteen at heart, though with hair that reminded me of ‘Alps in the sunset’; not handsome, perhaps, but something in the whole cut of him that pleased me.”

A year later, N. P. Willis, who was a great observer of proportions, met Moore at Lady Blessington’s, and thus recorded his observations: “His forehead is wrinkled, with the exception of a most prominent development of the organ of gayety, which, singularly enough, shines with the lustre and smooth polish of a pearl, and is surrounded by a semicircle of lines drawn close about it like intrenchments against Time. His eyes still sparkle like a champagne bubble, though the invader has drawn his pencillings about the corners.... His mouth is the most characteristic feature of all. The lips are delicately cut, slight, and changeable as an aspen, but there is a set look about the lower lip—a determination of the muscle to a particular expression, and you fancy that you can almost see wit astride upon it.... The slightly tossed nose confirms the fun of the expression, and altogether it is a face that sparkles, beams, radiates.”

This was Moore as others saw him when he was in his prime. His later years were clouded by a loss of memory, and a helplessness almost childish. The light of his intellect grew dim by degrees, although Lord John Russell said that there was never a total extinction of the bright flame. He died calmly and without pain; and the cast of his face certainly reflects much that Willis had drawn in his Pencillings by the Way.

Sheridan said once of a fellow-Irishman that Burke’s “abilities, happily for the glory of our age, are not intrusted to the perishable eloquence of the day, but will live to be the admiration of that hour when all of us shall be mute, and most of us forgotten.” Burke, in all his relations, was a better man than Sheridan, and he met, as he deserved, a better fate. He fell asleep for the last time with Addison’s chapter on “The Immortality of the Soul” under his pillow, and with the respect and gratitude of all England at his feet. The mask of Burke was offered for sale—and was sold—in London a few months ago, with a certificate from Mr. Edward B. Wood, stating that it was made by the especial desire of Queen Charlotte on the day of Burke’s death. The name of the artist is unknown, but he is said to have received two hundred guineas for the work. After the death of her Majesty the mask was given by George IV. to C. Nugent, his gentleman-in-waiting, from whom it came into the possession of his nephew, Mr. Wood. This original mask, from the Queen’s cabinet, is now the property of The Players. It is very like the familiar portrait of Burke by Opie.

George Combe had a mask of Curran in this country, of which mine, no doubt, is a replica, as it bears a strong resemblance to the established portraits of Curran. Its existence does not appear to have been known to the sculptor of the medallion head of Curran on the monument in St. Patrick’s, Dublin, for that was avowedly taken from the portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. A short time before his death Curran wrote to a friend that his “entire life had been passed in a wretched futurity,” but that happily he had found the remedy, and that was to “give over the folly of breathing at all.” He ceased to breathe at all in Brompton, London, in the autumn of 1817; and his bones, now buried in Dublin, were laid for some years in a vault of Paddington church.

We learn from various sources that Curran was under the middle height, “very ugly,” with intensely bright, black eyes, perfectly straight jet-black hair, a “thick” complexion, and “a protruding underlip on a retreating face.” Croker, speaking of his oratory, said: “You began by being prejudiced against him by his bad character and ill-looking appearance, like the devil with his tail cut off, and you were at last carried away by his splendid language and by the power of his metaphor.”

The mask of Lord Palmerston was taken immediately after death at Brockton Hall, by Mr. Jackson. Only one cast was ever made—that which is in my collection—and upon this was based the head upon the statue of Palmerston by Mr. Jackson, now in Westminster Abbey. The Marquis of Lorne, in his Life of Palmerston, says: “Some of us may have seen him rise quickly and lightly, when nearly fourscore, from his seat in the House of Commons, and speak with clearness and directness but no attempt at eloquence, and often with some hesitation, at the table; his black frock-coat buttoned across the well-knit and erect figure of middle stature, his sentences spoken towards the bar of the House; his gray short hair brushed forward and the gray whiskers framing the head erect on the shoulders. Some may remember, under the shaven chin, the loose bow-knot, neatly tied at the throat, the bit of open shirt-front, with standing collar.” His appearance in 1837 is thus described: “Lord Palmerston is tall and handsome. His face is round and of the darkest hue. His hair is black, and always exhibits proofs of the skill and attention of the friseur. His clothes are in the extreme of fashion. He is very fond of his personal appearance.” And Sir William Fraser sketched him as he appeared to a later generation: “Lord Palmerston on horseback looked a big man, and standing at the table of the House he did not appear ill-proportioned. Each foot, to describe it mathematically, was ‘a four-sided, irregular figure.’ His portraits in Punch are very like him. Those with a flower or straw in the mouth are the best. He had a very horsy look.”

The death-mask of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, as here shown, was found by me a year or two ago in the out-of-the-way little shop of a mould-maker in Chelsea. It was taken by Sir Edgar Boehm, and the nose in the cast was broken, evidently intentionally and wantonly, by some malicious person who wished, perhaps, in this iconoclastic way to express with emphasis his political opinions. Despite its mutilated condition it is of great interest to all lovers and admirers of the original.

The best pen-portrait of Disraeli as well as the most familiar, is that of N. P. Willis, who saw him, in his youth, at Lady Blessington’s. It says: “He was sitting in a window looking on Hyde Park, the last rays of sunlight reflected from the gorgeous gold flowers of a splendidly embroidered waistcoat. Patent-leather pumps, a white stick with a black cord and tassel, and a quantity of chain about his neck and pockets, served to make him a conspicuous object. He has one of the most remarkable faces I ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the energy of his action and the strength of his lungs, would seem to be a victim of consumption. His eye is as black as Erebus and has the most mocking, lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of working and impatient nervousness; and when he has burst forth, as he does constantly, with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraordinary as his taste in waistcoats. A thick, heavy mass of jet-black ringlets falls on his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, which on the left temple is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl. The conversation turned upon Beckford. I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he clothed his description. He talked like a race-horse approaching the winning-post, every muscle in action.” This is the Disraeli whom D’Orsay drew.

Mr. T. Wemyss Reid thus sketches Disraeli in later life: “Over the high arched forehead—surely the forehead of a poet—there hangs from the crown of the head a single curl of dark hair, a curl which you cannot look at without feeling a touch of pathos in your inmost heart, for it is the only thing about the worn and silent man reminding you of the brilliant youth of Vivian Grey. The face below this solitary lock is deeply marked with the furrows left by care’s ploughshare; the fine dark eyes look downward, the mouth is closed with a firmness that says more for his tenacity of will than pages of eulogy would do; but what strikes you more than anything else is the utter lack of expression upon the countenance. No one looking at the face, though but for a moment, could fall into the error of supposing that expression and intelligence are not there; they are there, but in concealment.”

Mr. W. P. Frith, in his Autobiography, more than once alludes to the devotion of Mrs. Disraeli to her husband, and he quotes John Phillips as describing the painting of Disraeli’s portrait. After the subject and his wife had seen the sketch, during the first sitting, the colors being necessarily crude, the lady returned hastily to the studio, and said to the painter: “Remember that his pallor is his beauty!”

Dr. Wilde, afterwards Sir William Wilde, published in Dublin, in 1849, a volume entitled The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life, a very interesting book now long out of print. It is an elaborate defence of Swift’s sanity, and it contains a full account of the plaster mask taken from the Dean’s face “after the post-mortem examination.” From this, he said, “a bust was made and placed in the museum of the University, which, notwithstanding its possessing much of the cadaverous appearance, is, we are strongly inclined to believe, the best likeness of Swift—during, at least, the last few years of his life—now in existence.” Speaking of this mask, Sir Walter Scott wrote: “The expression of countenance is most unequivocally maniacal, and one side of the mouth (the left) horribly contorted downwards, as if convulsed by pain.” Dr. Wilde, on the other hand, said: “The expression is remarkably placid; but there is an evident drag in the left side of the mouth, exhibiting a paralysis of the facial muscles of the right side, which, we have reason to believe, existed for some years before his death.”

Dr. Wilde compared this cast of Swift’s face, taken immediately after death, with the cast and drawings of his skull made in 1835, ninety years later, when the bodies of Swift and Stella were exhumed, and their craniums examined by the phrenologists belonging to the British Association; and by careful analysis of both, he was able to satisfy himself that Swift was not “a driveller and a show” when he died, nor a madman while he lived. He gave, upon the sixty-second page of his book, a drawing of this mask in profile, and the face is certainly identical with the face in my collection. It resembles very strongly the accepted portraits of Swift, particularly the two in which he was drawn without his wig. The more familiar of these is a profile in crayon, by Barber, taken when the Dean was about sixty years of age—and eighteen years before his death—which has been frequently engraved for the several editions of Lord Orrery’s Remarks on the Life and Writings of Jonathan Swift, first published in 1751. The original cast was made in two parts, according to Dr. Wilde, and the difference in surface between the rough hinder part—not existing in my copy—and the smooth polished anterior portion, as here seen, shows at once that the back of the head was added at a later date. Two lines of writing, greatly defaced, found upon the cast attest this to be “Dean Swift taken off his ... the night of his burial, and the ... one side larger than the other in nature.” In a foot-note to the second edition of his work, Dr. Wilde said: “The original mask remained in the museum T.C.D. [Trinity College, Dublin] till within a few years ago [1849], when it was accidentally destroyed.” The history of this replica—for replica it certainly is—before it came into my hands I have never been able to trace. It found its way into the shop of a dealer in curiosities, who knew nothing of its pedigree, not even whose face it was; and from him I bought it for a few shillings. It is one of the most interesting of the collection, and perhaps the most valuable, because the most rare. It is hardly the Swift of our imagination, the man whom Stella worshipped and Vanessa adored; and, Dr. Wilde to the contrary, notwithstanding, one cannot help feeling while looking at it that Swift’s own sad prophecy to Dr. Young was fulfilled—“I shall be like that lofty elm whose head has been blasted; I shall die first at the top.”

At least one of the biographers of the Irish dean died as Byron often feared to die, “like Swift, at the top first.” Sir Walter Scott’s decay was a mental decay in the beginning of his last illness; but happily for him, and for his family, the axe was laid at the root of the grand old monarch of the forest of Scottish letters before the upper branches were permitted to go to utter ruin.

There exist at Abbotsford two masks of its first laird—a life-mask and a death-mask. Of the former very little is known except that it is said to have been made in Paris. The latter was exhibited at the Scott Centenary Celebration in Edinburgh, in 1871, when it attracted a great deal of attention. They both show, as no portrait of the living man shows, except the familiar sketch by Maclise in the Fraser Gallery, the peculiar formation of his head, and the unusual length above the eyes. Lockhart, in his account of Scott’s last hours, said: “It was a beautiful day; so warm that every window was wide open, and so perfectly still that the sound of all others most delicious to his ears—the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles—was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes. No sculptor ever marbled a more majestic image of repose.”

He does not mention the taking of the death-mask, however, and nowhere alludes to it. It was made by George Bullock—it is said, at the request of Dr. Spurzheim—and Bullock and Chantrey both used it in modelling posthumous busts of the bard. It was loaned to Sir (then Mr.) Edwin Landseer while he was painting his full-length portrait of Sir Walter, with the background of the scenery of the Rhymer’s Glen.

Bullock supposed that the original mould was destroyed not long after Scott’s death, but Mr. Gourlay Steel writes that his brother, Sir John Steel, while engaged upon the monument to Lockhart at Dryburgh Abbey, some years later, came upon it accidentally at Abbotsford, and used it in remodelling his bust of Sir Walter for Mr. Hope-Scott.

Chantrey, in comparing the measurements of Scott’s head from this mask with the measurements he had made of the head of Shakspere on the Stratford monument—which latter he had always considered unnatural, if not impossible—found, to his great surprise, that they were almost identical in height from the eyes up; and in each case he noticed the very unusual length of the upper-lip. It was this dome-like feature of Scott’s head which inspired one of his jocular friends in Edinburgh to hail him once, when he dragged himself up the stairs of the Session House with his hat in his hand, as “Peveril of the Peak.”

When Carlyle last saw Scott—they never met to exchange a word—it was in one of the streets of Edinburgh, late in Scott’s life; and, “Alas!” wrote the younger man, “his fine Scottish face, with its shaggy honesty and goodness, was all worn with care, the joy all fled from it, and ploughed deep with labor and sorrow.”

Eighteen months after the death of Scott, the Burns mausoleum at Dumfries was opened to receive the remains of Burns’s widow, when, according to the appendix to the first edition of Allan Cunningham’s Life of Burns, then going through the press, a cast was taken from the cranium of the poet. Mr. Archibald Blacklock, surgeon of Dumfries, who made the examination, declared that “the cranial bones were perfect in every respect, and were firmly held together by their sutures,” etc., etc. Unfortunately there is no cast of the head of the poet, living or dead, except this one here shown of his fleshless skull. George Combe, who received a replica of it from the executors of Mrs. Burns, presented a number of wood-cuts of it, in various positions, in his Phrenology, and he was very fond of using it to point his morals.

It is unusually large, even for the skull of a Scotchman; and viewed laterally, its length, due to the magnitude of the anterior lobe, is enormous.

Combe frequently reproduced the skull of Robert the Bruce, shown here as well, although he failed to explain the mystery of its existence in plaster. The skeletons of Bruce and his queen were discovered early in the present century by a party of workmen who were making certain repairs in the Abbey Church of Dunfermline. The bones of the hero of Bannockburn were identified from the description of the interment in contemporary records, and from the fact that the ribs on the left side had been roughly sawn away when the heart was delivered to Sir James Douglas, and sent off on its pious and romantic, but unsuccessful, pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The skull of Bruce, in an excellent state of preservation, was examined carefully by the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh, then in the highest tide of its enthusiasm and prosperity; and with the consent of the Crown, this cast of it was made. A gentleman who wrote anonymously to Notes and Queries, August 27, 1859, some forty years later, said that he remembered distinctly seeing and handling this skull, and the great sensation its discovery created. It was reinterred in its original resting-place a day or two later.

The London Times contained, not very long ago, the following curious advertisement: “Napoleon I. For sale, the original mask moulded at Saint Helena by Dr. Antomarchi. Price required, £6000. Address,” etc., etc.

Dr. F. Antomarchi, a native of Corsica, and a professor of anatomy at Florence, at the request of Cardinal Fesch and of “Madame Mère,” and with the consent of the British government, went to Saint Helena in 1819 as physician to the exiled Emperor. He closed his master’s eyes in death; and immediately before the official post-mortem examination, held the next day, he made the mask in question. He said in his report that the face was relaxed, but that the mask was correct so far as the shape of the forehead and nose was concerned. And unquestionably it is the most truthful portrait of Bonaparte that exists.

When Napoleon thought himself closely observed, he had, according to Sir Walter Scott, “the power of discharging from his countenance all expression save that of an indefinite smile, and presenting to the curious investigator the fixed and rigid eyes of a marble bust.” As he is here observed, no matter how curiously or how closely, he is seen as he was. It is the face of Napoleon off his guard.

Bonaparte’s distinguishing traits were selfishness, combativeness, destructiveness, acquisitiveness, secretiveness, self-esteem, and love of approbation. He had some vague notion of benevolence and of veneration, but he was blind to the dictates of truth and of justice, and he was so utterly deficient in conscientiousness that he does not seem to have been conscious of its existence.

His entire character was summed up once in four broken-English words, by an ignorant little local guide in Berlin. Fritz, showing a party of Americans through the royal palace at Charlottenburg, worked himself up to a pitch of patriotic frenzy in describing the conduct of the parvenu French Emperor during his occupancy of the private apartments of the legitimate German Queen, and he concluded his harangue by saying, quietly and decidedly, “But then, you know, Napoleon was no gentleman!”

That seems to tell the whole story. He was, in his way, the greatest man who ever lived. He stepped from a humble cradle in an Italian provincial town on to the throne of France; he made his commonplace brothers and sisters and his ignorant henchmen kings and queens of all the European countries within his reach; he locked a pope in a closet, as if he had been a naughty boy; he re-drew the map of half the world; he re-wrote history; his name will live as long as books are read; no man out of so little ever accomplished so much—but yet he was no gentleman!

The Bonaparte mask, in bronze, as here shown is very rare. Only four are known to exist. The copy in the Paris Mint—Hotel des Monnaies—is without the gilded wreath which this copy possesses. It is said to have “been taken from the Emperor’s face at St. Helena, twenty hours after his death.”

The mask of Napoleon III. was taken, of course, at Chiselhurst. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was distinguished, particularly, as being the only Bonaparte, for four generations at least, who bore no resemblance whatever to the Bonaparte family, not one of the strongly marked facial traits so universal in the tribe appearing in him.

No matter what may have been his shortcomings in other respects, he was devoted to his mother and to her memory. She used to call him “the mildly obstinate;” and the maternal judgment, perhaps, was mildly correct. Kinglake expressed it more epigrammatically when he said that “his characteristic was a faltering boldness.” The historian of the Crimea, in his account of the attempt at Strasburg in 1836, pictured Prince Louis as “a young man with the bearing and the countenance of a weaver—a weaver oppressed by long hours of monotonous in-door work, which makes the body stoop and keeps the eyes downcast.” Those half-shut eyes impressed every one who saw the Third Napoleon in life. He was called by Madden, in his Memoirs of the Countess of Blessington, “the man with the heavy eyelids, with the leaden hand of care and calculation pressing them down—the man-mystery, the depths of whose duplicity no Œdipus has yet sounded—the man with the pale, corpse-like, imperturbable features.” Neither Mr. Kinglake nor the chosen biographer of the Blessingtons, however, was an impartial witness. Henry Wikoff, on the other hand, declared that his face recorded resolution, and that his eyes, which he kept half closed, revealed subtlety as well as daring. “His manner,” according to the Chevalier, “was graceful, composed, and very distingué. He had the air of a man superior by nature as by birth.” And Mrs. Browning believed in him and trusted him, and called him “the good and the just.” He was perhaps the mildest-mannered man who ever scuttled ship of State, or cut a political throat.