“You continually aspire (streben); are covetous of distinction, and very sensitive to neglect; have a great deal of ambition, and of various kinds; these you rapidly interchange, and want to reach your object quickly, for your imagination is stronger than your patience; and therefore you must find peculiarly favourable circumstances in order to succeed.”
“You have, however, qualities which make you capable of no common things, even the organ of perseverance and constancy is strongly expressed on your skull, but obstructed by so many conflicting organs, that you stand in need of great excitement to give room for it to act: then the nobler powers are called forward, and the meaner ones recede.”
“You value wealth very highly, as all do who wish to accomplish great objects,—but only as means, not as end. Money in itself is indifferent to you, and it is possible that you are not always a very good manager of it.”
“You want to have all your wishes gratified in a moment, as with an enchanter’s wand: often however, the wish expires before the fulfilment is possible. The pleasures of sense, and delight in the beautiful, have a powerful influence over you; and as you certainly incline to the imperious, the ambitious, and the vain, you have here a cluster of qualities, against which you have need to be upon your guard not to fall into great faults; for all propensities in themselves are good; it is only their abuse that renders them a source of evil. Even the organs so erroneously designated by the father of our science the organs of murder and theft, (now more correctly termed organs of destructiveness and acquisitiveness) are only marks of energy and of desire to possess, which, when united with good-nature, conscientiousness and foresight, form a finely constituted head; though without these intellectual qualities they may easily lead to crime.”
He also said, that in judging of a skull it was necessary to regard not the separate organs, but the aggregate of the whole; for that they respectively modified each other in various ways; nay, sometimes entirely neutralized each other; that therefore the proportions of the whole afforded the true key to the character of the man.
As a universal rule, he laid down, that men whose skulls, if divided by a supposed perpendicular line drawn through the middle of the ear, presented a larger mass before than behind, were the higher portion of the species; for that the fore part contains the intellectual, the hind part the animal propensities.
All the skulls of criminals who had been executed, for instance, which he had in his collection, confirmed his theory; and in one distinguished for the atrocious character of his offence, the occiput was two-thirds of the whole head. The busts of Nero and Caracalla exhibit the same proportions.—Where the contrary extreme prevails, the individual in question is deficient in energy: and here, as in every thing, a balance is the true desideratum.
Mr. Deville affirmed that it was possible, not only to enlarge organs already prominent by the exercise of the qualities they denote, but by that very process to diminish others; and assured me that no age was excepted from this rule. He showed me the cast of a skull of a gentleman who, when near sixty, devoted himself intensely to the study of astronomy; and in a few years the appropriate ‘bosse’ became so prominent as to project considerably beyond all others.[62]
July 14.
I have paid several visits to Mr. Nash, to whom I am indebted for much valuable instruction in my art. He is said to have ‘erected’ an enormous fortune. He has a beautiful country-house, and no artist is more handsomely lodged in town. I was particularly pleased with his library. It consists of a long and wide gallery, with twelve deep niches on each side, and two large doorways at the ends, leading into two other spacious rooms. In each niche is a semicircular window in the roof, and on the wall a fresco painting, copied from the ‘Logge di Rafaelle;’ and below these, casts of the best antique statues, on pedestals. The remaining space in the niches is occupied by books, which, however, rise no higher than the pedestal of the statues. Arabesques, also copied from those of the Vatican, admirably executed in fresco, adorn the broad pilasters between the niches.