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animal; nor have I ever met with any person that did.

We continually find, however, the most decided differences, and even direct oppositions of opinion, concerning the respective beauty of different animals of the same species, not only between different individuals, but between whole classes and generations of

men.

Ask a modern grazier what constitutes a beautiful bull or cow, and he will tell you, a small neat head, a round neck, a large long and straight body, supported by very short and slender legs. But how different is such an animal from that

cui turpe caput, cui plurima cervix; Et crurum tenus à mento palearia pendent *.?

Long palearia or dewlaps are also enumerated among the beauties of the bull that captivated Europa; and perhaps, not only a painter, but any impartial and uninformed person might agree with the princess and her poet: but, to the real judge of horned cattle, there can scarcely be a greater deformity. The case is that the poet and the painter are looking for those forms and proportions, which are best

* Georgic. iii. 52 —The description is of a cow; but of a cow, whose form is best adapted to breed fine male calves.

† Ovid. Metamorph.

adapted to exhibit ease, elegance, and dignity of gesture and action, and pleasing varieties of light and shade; while the grazier is only calculating the quantity of eatable and nutritive flesh, which the animal, in the least possible time, and with the least possible quantity of food, may bring into the shambles; and this consideration forms the scale of his preference. Habit, however, has taught him to think the forms and proportions, upon which he can calculate to most advantage, real and essential beauties; and to hold in the utmost contempt the taste and judgment of any person, who should doubt their being so. The beauties of ease, elegance, and dignity are equally addressed to the mind, and independent of organic sense; as will be more fully shown. hereafter wherefore who shall presume to decide that the one are more truly and properly beauties, than the other? The beauties of light, shade, and colour are all that affect the eye, or make any impression upon organic sense and perception; wherefore, as far as mere visible beauty is meant, a water spaniel of the kind which Weenix so often painted, and of which Golzius has made so fine a print, seems to me to be a still more beautiful animal than a zebra; or, perhaps, than any existing: for his long curling hair affords more play and variety of light and shadow; and the brown

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CHAP.

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and white colours, with which that hair is diversified, are distributed into irregular masses Of Sight., instead of regular stripes; and irregularity is

certainly an ingredient of beauty, so far as it affects the organs of sense only; whence painters delight not only in irregular trees, but irregular buildings, and buildings irregularly mixed with trees; which afford more varieties of tint, and a more luxuriant play of light and shadow, than any regular combination of parts can produce; though these may be required by the understanding in other instances.

27. We must not, however, attempt to apply these principles of abstract beauty to the charms of the other sex, or imagine that we can prove or illustrate them by instances drawn. from that source: for though the person, hypothetically stated above to be restored to sight, would give the preference in beauty to the female, whose colour made the most agreeable impression on his eye, provided there was no difference in expression to influence his choice, yet this preference would be of a very cold kind, and utterly void of all the warmth of sexual desire. It would also be guided by principles totally different from those, which direct the choice of men, who have been accustomed to employ the sense of vision, as the criterion of their sexual predilections: for such

a person would not be able to distinguish the blush of modesty or glow of sensibility, from the redness caused by intemperance, or morbid inflammation: nor would the delicate fairness, or cadaverous whiteness of a skin make any other impressions respectively upon his feelings, than the same different degrees or modifications of the same tint, seen in other substances. All the fascinating attractions of these charms of the sex owe their influence to sympathy and habit; as being symptoms of mental and bodily perfections, the meaning of which is only known by experience and observation; so that it could neither be felt nor understood by a person, who saw them for the first time. The redness of any morbid inflammation may display a gradation of tint, which, in a pink or a rose, we should think as beautiful as the purple light of love and bloom of young desire; and the cadaverous paleness of death or disease, a degree of whiteness, which, in a piece of marble or alabaster, we should deem to be as pure, as that of the most delicate skin of the fairest damsel of the frigid zone: consequently, the mere visible beauty is in both the same; and the difference consists entirely in mental sympathies, excited by certain internal stimuli, and guided by habit. The African black, when he first beholds an European complexion, thinks both its red and

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white morbid and unnatural, and of course disgusting. His sun-burnt beauties express their modesty and sensibility by variations in the sable tints of their countenances, which are equally attractive to him, as the most delicate blush of red is to us. Were it possible

for a person to judge of the beauty of colour in his own species, upon the same principles and with the same impartiality, as he judges of it in other objects, both animal, vegetable, and mineral, there can be no doubt but that mixed tints would be preferred; and a pimpled face have the same superiority over a smooth one, as a zebra has over an ass, a variegated tulip over a plain one, or a column of jasper or porphyry over one of common red or white marble. It does, however, sometimes happen that men of quick sibility and vivid imaginations fall seriously and violently in love, at first sight, and without any other knowledge of the object than what is, at the moment, acquired through the sense of vision: but nevertheless, it is not any merely organic pleasure, felt by this sense, that attaches them; but mental sympathies acting through the medium of the imagination; as shall hereafter be explained.

28. As light is the sole medium of vision, the effects of visible objects upon the eye must depend, not only upon the quantities reflected from them, and the modes of its reflection or

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