ever see a large number of them without this
impression being confirmed; though I hasten to add that I have sometimes
felt it to be woefully shaken in the presence of a small number. I
suspect that a great English crowd would yield a larger percentage of
handsome faces and figures than any other. With regard to the upper
class I imagine this is generally granted; but I should extend it to the
whole people. Certainly, if the English populace strike the observer by
their good looks they must be very good-looking indeed. They are as
ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their garments have
that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common with some forms
of ragged picturesqueness. It is the hard prose of misery--an ugly and
hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is especially noticeable
in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the women, which look as if
their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, as a hint of what
is in store for their wearers. Then it is not too much to say that
two-thirds of the London faces, among the "masses," bear in some degree
or other the traces of liquor, which is not a beautifying fluid. The
proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very
striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact
that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently once handsome. A
very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the
distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes
from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon--the pallid, stunted,
misbegotten and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in
every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest
an equal degree of misery. But when these abatements are made, the
observer is still liable to be struck by the frequency of well-modeled
faces and bodies well put together; of strong, straight brows and
handsome mouths and noses, of rounded, finished chins and well-poised
heads, of admirable complexions and well-disposed limbs.

All this, I admit, is a description of the men rather than of the women;
but to a certain extent it includes the women. There is much more beauty
among English women of the lower class than strangers who are accustomed
to dwell upon their "coarseness" recognize. Pretty heads, pretty mouths
and cheeks and chins, pretty eyes too, if you are content with a
moderate brilliancy, and at all events charming