deacons in their craft. It is a much easier thing to
assure a homely female, in prose or rhyme, that she is beautiful, than
to represent her so upon canvass. Her effigies are, I believe, pretty
numerous, varying in ugliness, but none that I have seen even
handsome--prettiness, of course, is out of the question. She was fond of
finery, but had no taste in dress. Her ruff is downright odious; and the
liberal exposure of her neck and bosom anything but alluring. With all
her pearls about her, she looks like a pawnbroker's lady bedizened for
an Easter ball, with all the unredeemed pledges from her husband's shop.
She seems to have patronized that chimera in the ideal or allegorical
portrait, at which Reubens and Sir Joshua were so often doomed to toil.
She would not allow a shadow in her picture, arguing, like a Chinese, or
a chop-logic, that shade is only an accident, and no true property of
body. Like Alexander, who forbade all sculptors but Lysippus to carve
his image, she prohibited all but special cunning limners from drawing
her effigy. This was in 1563, anno regni 5, while, though no chicken,
she still was not clean past her youth. This order was probably intended
to prevent caricatures. At last she quarrelled with her looking-glass as
well as her painters, and her maids of honour removed all mirrors from
her apartments, as carefully as Ministers exclude opposition papers (we
hope not Maga) from the presence of our most gracious sovereign. It is
even said, that those fair nettles of India took advantage of her
weakness, to dress her head awry, and to apply the rouge to her nose,
instead of her cheeks. So may the superannuated eagle be pecked at by
daws. But the tale is not probable. After all, it is but the captious
inference of witlings and scoffers, that attributes to mere sexual
vanity that superstitious horror of encroaching age, from which the
wisest are not always free. It may be, that they shrink from the
reflection of their wrinkles, not as from the despoilers of beauty, but
as from the vaunt-couriers of dissolution. In rosy youth, while yet the
brow is alabaster-veined with Heaven's own tint, and the dark tresses
turn golden in the sun, the lapse of time is imperceptible as the
throbbing of a heart at ease. "So like, so very like, is day to
day,"--one primrose scarce more like another. Whoever saw their first
grey hairs, or marked the crow-feet at the angle of their eyes, without
a sigh or a tear, a momentous