egrade beneath the influence of modern barbarism, is but too
likely to follow the Demos of ancient Byzantium, or of modern Paris.

Ay, but her intellect. She is so clever, and she reads so much, and she
is going to be taught to read so much more.

Ah, well--there was once a science called physiognomy. The Greeks, from
what I can learn, knew more of it than any people since: though the
Italian painters and sculptors must have known much; far more than we. In
a more scientific civilisation there will be such a science once more:
but its laws, though still in the empiric stage, are not altogether
forgotten by some. Little children have often a fine and clear instinct
of them. Many cultivated and experienced women have a fine and clear
instinct of them likewise. And some such would tell us that there is
intellect in plenty in the modern Nausicaa: but not of the quality which
they desire for their country's future good. Self-consciousness,
eagerness, volubility, petulance, in countenance, in gesture, and in
voice--which last is too often most harsh and artificial, the breath
being sent forth through the closed teeth, and almost entirely at the
corners of the mouth--and, with all this, a weariness often about the
wrinkling forehead and the drooping lids;--all these, which are growing
too common, not among the Demos only, nor only in the towns, are signs,
they think, of the unrest of unhealth, physical, intellectual, spiritual.
At least they are as different as two types of physiognomy in the same
race can be, from the expression both of face and gesture, in those old
Greek sculptures, and in the old Italian painters; and, it must be said,
in the portraits of Reynolds, and Gainsborough, Copley, and Romney. Not
such, one thinks, must have been the mothers of Britain during the latter
half of the last century and the beginning of the present; when their
sons, at times, were holding half the world at bay.

And if Nausicaa has become such in town: what is she when she goes to the
seaside, not to wash the clothes in fresh-water, but herself in salt--the
very salt-water, laden with decaying organisms, from which, though not
polluted further by a dozen sewers, Ulysses had to cleanse himself,
anointing, too, with oil, ere he was fit to appear in the company of
Nausicaa of Greece? She dirties herself with the dirty salt-water; and
probably chills and tires herself by walking thither and back, and
staying in too long; and then