2ndly. The word beauty is necessarily attached to Indian as designative of sex: "an Indian," unqualified by any other distinction, would imply a male; but an "Indian beauty" is at once understood to be a female.
3rdly. The repetition, or rather the opposition, of "beauteous" and "beauty," cannot seriously be objected to by any one conversant with the phraseology of Shakspeare. Were it at all necessary, many similar examples might be cited. How the anonymous annotator, already quoted, could say that the sentence, as it stands in the folio, "by no means serves to illustrate Bassanio's reflexion," I cannot conceive. "The beauteous scarf" is the deceptive ornament which leads to the expectation of something beneath it better than an Indian beauty! Indian is used adjectively, in the sense of wild, savage, hideous—just as we, at the present day, might say a Hottentot beauty; or as Shakspeare himself in other places uses the word "Ethiop:"
"Thou for whom Jove would swear
"Her mother was her painting."
—Cymbeline, Act III. Sc. 4.—I have read Mr. Halliwell's pamphlet upon this expression, noticed in "N. & Q." of the 10th of April (p. 358.) I would beg to suggest to that gentleman that he has overlooked one text in Shakspeare that would tell more for his argument than the whole of those he has cited. All his examples are drawn from the word father, metaphorically applied in the sense of creator to inanimate objects; and the same sense he extends, by analogy, to mother. But in the following lines from As You Like It (Act III. Sc. 5.), mother is directly used as a sort of warranty of female beauty! Rosalind is reproving Phebe for her contempt of her lover, and in derision of her beauty, she asks:
"Who might be your mother?
That you insult, exult, and all at once,
Over the wretched?"
Now if Phebe had been one who smothered her in painting, an appropriate answer to Rosalind's question might have been—her mother was her painting!