1 The Readers of Jeremy Taylor will not fail to remember the passage following from his Great Exemplar.
“God's Judgments are like the writing upon the wall, which was a missive of anger from God upon Belshazzar. It came upon an errand of revenge, and yet was writ in so dark characters that none could read it but a prophet.”—DISC. xviii. Of the Causes and Manner of the Divine Judgments.
Some ill, he thought, was produced in human affairs by applying the term unfortunate to circumstances which were brought about by imprudence. A man was unfortunate, if being thrown from his horse on a journey, he broke arm or leg, but not if he broke his neck in steeple-hunting, or when in full cry after a fox; if he were impoverished by the misconduct of others, not if he were ruined by his own folly and extravagance; if he suffered in any way by the villainy of another, not if he were transported, or hanged for his own.
Neither would he allow that either man or woman could with propriety be called, as we not unfrequently hear in common speech, unfortunately ugly. Wickedly ugly, he said, they might be, and too often were; and in such cases the greater their pretensions to beauty, the uglier they were. But goodness has a beauty of its own, which is not dependent upon form and features, and which makes itself felt and acknowledged however otherwise ill-favoured the face may be in which it is set. He might have said with Seneca, errare mihi visus est qui dixit
Gratior est pulchro veniens e corpore virtus;
nullo enim honestamento eget; ipsa et magnum sui decus est, et corpus suum consecret. None, he would say with great earnestness, appeared so ugly to his instinctive perception as some of those persons whom the world accounted handsome, but upon whom pride, or haughtiness or conceit had set its stamp, or who bore in their countenances what no countenance can conceal, the habitual expression of any reigning vice, whether it were sensuality and selfishness, or envy, hatred, malice and uncharitableness. Nor could he regard with any satisfaction a fine face which had no ill expression, if it wanted a good one: he had no pleasure in beholding mere formal and superficial beauty, that which lies no deeper than the skin, and depends wholly upon “a set of features and complexion.” He had more delight, he said in looking at one of the statues in Mr. Weddel's collection, than at a beautiful woman if he read in her face that she was as little susceptible of any virtuous emotion as the marble. While therefore he would not allow that any person could be unfortunately ugly, he thought that many were unfortunately handsome, and that no wise parent would wish his daughter to be eminently beautiful, lest what in her childhood was naturally and allowably the pride of his eye—should when she grew up become the grief of his heart. It requires no wide range of observation to discover that the woman who is married for her beauty has little better chance of happiness than she who is married for her fortune. “I have known very few women in my life,” said Mrs. Montagu, “whom extraordinary charms and accomplishments did not make unhappy.”
CHAPTER CLXXXI.
NO DEGREE OF UGLINESS REALLY UNFORTUNATE.—FIDUS CORNELIUS COMPARED TO A PLUCKED OSTRICH.—WILKES' CLAIM TO UGLINESS CONSIDERED AND NEGATIVED BY DR. JOHNSON, NOTWITHSTANDING HOGARTH'S PORTRAIT.—CAST OF THE EYE À LA MONTMORENCY.—ST. EVREMOND AND TURENNE.—WILLIAM BLAKE THE PAINTER, AND THE WELSH TRIADS.—CURIOUS EXTRACT FROM THAT VERY CURIOUS AND RARE BOOK, THE DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE OF HIS OWN PICTURES,—AND A PAINFUL ONE FROM HIS POETICAL SKETCHES.