generality of cases,
physiognomy is a sound and faithful science, and tells us, if not,
alas! what the man might have been, still what he has become. Yet
even this former problem, what he might have been, may often be
solved for us by youthful portraits, before sin and sorrow and
weakness have had their will upon the features; and, therefore, when
we spoke of these four beautiful faces, we alluded, in each case, to
the earliest portraits of each genius which we could recollect.
Placing them side by side, we must be allowed to demand for that of
Robert Burns an honourable station among them. Of Shakespeare's we
do not speak, for it seems to us to combine in itself the elements of
all the other three; but of the rest, we question whether Burns be
not, after all, if not the noblest, still the most lovable--the most
like what we should wish that of a teacher of men to be. Raffaelle--
the most striking portrait of him, perhaps, is the full-face pencil
sketch by his own hand in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford--though
without a taint of littleness or effeminacy, is soft, melancholy,
formed entirely to receive and to elaborate in silence. His is a
face to be kissed, not worshipped. Goethe, even in his earliest
portraits, looks as if his expression depended too much on his own
will. There is a self-conscious power, and purpose, and self-
restraint, and all but scorn, upon those glorious lineaments, which
might win worship, and did; but not love, except as the child of
enthusiasm or of relationship. But Burns's face, to judge of it by
the early portrait of him by Nasmyth, must have been a face like that
of Joseph of old, of whom the Rabbis relate, that he was mobbed by
the Egyptian ladies whenever he walked the streets. The magic of
that countenance, making Burns at once tempter and tempted, may
explain many a sad story. The features certainly are not perfectly
regular; there is no superabundance of the charm of mere animal
health in the outline or colour: but the marks of intellectual
beauty in the face are of the highest order, capable of being but too
triumphant among a people of deep thought and feeling. The lips,
ripe, yet not coarse or loose, full of passion and the faculty of
enjoyment, are parted, as if forced to speak by the inner fulness of
the heart; the features are rounded, rich, and tender, and yet the
bones show thought massively and manfully everywhere; the eyes laugh
out upon you with boundless good humou