But what the repining enemy commends,

That breath fame follows; that praise, sole pure, transcends." And in yet another scene, Agamemnon, King of Men, pithily and pointedly tells that stalwart dullard-big, blustering, boisterous Ajax-who, for the life of him, cannot see the pith or point of it, that "whatever praises itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise." Ajax suspects not the general to mean that he, son of Telamon, is his own praise, his own chronicle.

One more excerpt from our myriad-minded poet :-" Then we wound our modesty, and make foul the clearness of our deservings, when of ourselves we publish them." The wise saw drops from the sententious lips of the sage old steward of the Countess of Roussillon in what is probably as little read and slightly relished as any of Shakspeare's plays.

Years ago there used to perambulate the streets of London, a prodigy of a hat, some seven feet high, the trade-mark advertisement of a hatter in the Strand. This gigantic puff Mr. Carlyle once made the text for some characteristic strictures on the puffery of the age. Every man his own trumpeter: that he alleged was, to an alarming extent, the accepted rule. "Make loudest possible proclamation of your hat." Against which doctrine our strenuous censor morum objected, that nature requires no man to make proclamation of his doings and hat-makings; but, on the contrary, forbids all men to make such. There is not, he contends, a man, or hatmaker born into the world but feels, or has felt, that he is degrading himself if he speak of his excellences, and prowesses, and supremacy in his craft. His inmost heart says to him, "Leave thy friends to speak of these: if possible, thy enemies to speak of these; but at all events, thy friends."

PAINTED FACE, TIRED HEAD, & EXPOSED SKULL.

J

2 KINGS ix. 30, 35.

EZEBEL'S painting her face and tiring her head, is so immediately followed, in the narrative of her death and non-burial, by there being found no more of her left than the skull, besides the feet and the palms of the hands, that the connection is grimly suggestive of certain stanzas in the "Vision of Sin: "

"You are bones, and what of that?

Every face, however full,

Padded round with flesh and fat,
Is but modell'd on a skull.

"Death is king, and Vivat Rex !

Tread a measure on the stones,
Madam-if I know your sex

From the fashion of your bones."

Byron muses on a skull* from among scattered heaps, as now a shattered cell which even the worm disdains; he ponders on its broken arch, its ruined wall, its chambers desolate, and portals foul; yet,

"this was once Ambition's airy hall,
The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul :
Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit

And Passion's host, that never brook'd control."

It is Yorick's skull that Hamlet is apostrophizing when he says, "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come." Tôt ou tard, as le bon réligieux in "Atala" reminds his fair young listener, quelle qu'eût été votre felicité, ce beau visage se fût changé en cette figure uniforme que le sépulcre donne à la famille

When at Bologna he used to visit the Campo Santo, the sexton of which was a favourite of his, and the "beautiful and innocent face" of whose daughter of fifteen, he used to contrast with the skulls that peopled several cells there-and particularly with that of one skull dated 1766, "which was once covered (the tradition goes) by the most lovely features of Bologna-noble and rich."

d'Adam. The good king Réné had painted on the walls of one of the rooms in the Celestine monastery at Avignon, a skeleton—it was that of a once surpassing beauty who had won his heart. How would the moral have lost its point had the head of the skeleton been replaced, like that in the painter's room in the Strada Vecchia of Rome, so graphically described in "Dutch Pictures," by a mask, or cardboard "dummy" of a superlatively inane cast of beauty-the blue eyes and symmeterical lips (curved into an unmeaning and eternal simper), the pink cheeks, and silken doil's tresses, "contrasting strangely with the terribly matter-of-fact bones and ligaments beneaththe moral to my lady's looking-glass." Gwillim, the Pursuivant, as quoted, not approvingly, in Southey's "Doctor," counsels all gentlewomen that are proud of their beauty to consider that they "carry on their shoulders nothing but a skull wrapt in skin, which one day will be loathsome to be looked on." The old French poet Villon, aux charniers des Innocents, speculates in a manner that to one critic recalls the graveyard scene in "Hamlet," on the destiny of corps féminin, qui tant est tendre, poli, suave, gracieux-for how can he help his thoughts running thitherward "quand il considère ces têtes entassées en ces charniers"? Who, indeed, as Keats once asked,

"Who hath not loiter'd in a green churchyard,

And let his spirit, like a demon mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,

To see skull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stole ;
Pitying each form that hungry Death has marr'd,
And filling it once more with human soul?"

In such a spot Blair lingers, to apostrophize beauty, as a pretty plaything, a dear deceit, which the grave discredits. The charms expunged, the roses faded, and the lilies soiled, what has beauty more to boast of? Will the lovers of it flock round it now, to gaze and do it homage?

"Methinks I see thee with thy head low laid,
While, surfeited upon thy damask cheek,
The high-fed worm, in lazy volumes roll'd,
Riots unscared. For this was all thy caution?
For this thy painful labours at the glass,

T'improve those charms, and keep them in repair,
For which the spoiler thanks thee not?"

So that much less known, but much more powerful, writer, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, muses in Death's cabinet, the Campo Santo of Ferrara, on the "unfashionable worm," respectless of, alike, the crown-illumined brow and the cheek's bewitchment, as he creeps to his repast-on what? "No matter how clad or nicknamed it might strut above, what age or sex,-it is his dinner-time." The final residuum of such repasts becomes an unrecognisable skull, about which some chance possessor of it shall, in after days, perhaps, indulge in cynical conjectures and speculations in a tone and to a tune like this: "Did she live yesterday, or ages back?

What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?
And were your ringlets fair, or brown, or black,

Poor little head! that long has done with aching?"

Mercury, in Lucian's dialogue, shows Menippus the skulls of several world-famous beauties; and the philosopher falls to moralizing upon that of Helen. "Was it for this,"* he exclaims, "that a thousand ships sailed from Greece, so many brave men died, and so many cities were destroyed ?" Menippus was so far of the Ralph Nickleby type, "not a man to be moved by a pretty face," with a grinning skull beneath it : men like him profess to look and work below the surface, and so to see the skull, and not its delicate covering.

Where, asks the author of "Esmond," are those jewels now that beamed under Cleopatra's forehead, or shone in the sockets of Helen? With Mr. Thackeray in another place, again, we take the skull up, and think of the glances that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that shone in those vacant sockets, and cheeks dimpling with smiles that once covered that ghastly yellow framework. "They used to call those teeth pearls once. See! there's the cup

*Not to be forgotten, however, is the suggestive rejoinder of Mercury, that Menippus would have been as easily fooled as the rest of them, had he but seen, not that grinning skull, but the living face that once concealed it.

she drank from, the gold chain she wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her cheeks, her lookingglass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a feast we find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones." And has not Macaulay his "Sermon in a Churchyard"? wherein one practical improvement of the subject, as conventional pulpiteers phrase it, runs thus :

"Dost thou beneath the smile or frown

Of some vain woman bend thy knee?
Here take thy stand, and trample down
Things that were once as fair as she.
Here rave of her ten thousand graces,
Bosom, and lip, and eye, and chin,
While, as in scorn, the fleshless faces

Of Hamiltons and Waldegraves grin."

THE CARCASE OF JEZEBEL ON THE FACE OF THE FIELD.

IN

2 KINGS ix. 37.

N the portion of Jezreel-by a retributive local coincidence-were to lie the mangled remains of Jezebel— what the dogs should leave of her. "And the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel." This, Jezebel? how could this be identified with the superb wife and superior of the king of Israel, as she was in her prime of life and pride of place? or even with the faded form of her that, newly a widow, but energetic and manoeuvring to the last, and defiant in her fall, painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at the window as Jehu entered in at the gate? Imperious Jezebel, thrice puissant and insatiably presuming, transformed into a heap of bone dust-reduced to her lowest terms as mere organic matter -resolved into just so much manure upon the face of the eld.