- That no Woman can be Handsome by the Force of Features alone, any more than she can be Witty only by the Help of Speech.
- That Pride destroys all Symmetry and Grace, and Affectation is a more terrible Enemy to fine Faces than the Small-Pox.
- That no Woman is capable of being Beautiful, who is not incapable of being False.
- And, That what would be Odious in a Friend, is Deformity in a Mistress.
Grace was in all her Steps, Heaven in her Eye,
In all her Gestures Dignity and Love.
Underneath this Stone doth lie
As much Virtue as cou'd die,
Which when alive did Vigour give
To as much Beauty as cou'd live[3].
R.
Charles de St. Denis, Sieur de St. Evremond, died in 1703, aged 95, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His military and diplomatic career in France was closed in 1661, when his condemnations of Mazarin, although the Cardinal was then dead, obliged him to fly from the wrath of the French Court to Holland and afterwards to England, where Charles II granted him a pension of £300 a-year. At Charles's death the pension lapsed, and St. Evremond declined the post of cabinet secretary to James II. After the Revolution he had William III for friend, and when, at last, he was invited back, in his old age, to France, he chose to stay and die among his English friends. In a second volume of
Miscellany Essays by Monsieur de St. Evremont,
done into English by Mr. Brown (1694), an Essay
Of the Pleasure that Women take in their Beauty