nkey or the
horse standing patiently in the neighbour's paddock, and when she hasn't
animals to play with she will put a horseshoe on each hand and each foot,
and then you will hear from above the plod-plod-plod of a horse going its
daily round. But while she has a comprehensive affection for all
four-legged things, her most fervent love is reserved for the halt and the
blind.

It is only among children that we find the quality of charity sufficiently
strong to forgive deformity. The natural instinct is to turn away from any
physical imperfection. It is the instinct of the race for the preservation
of its forms. We call these forms beauty and the departure from them
ugliness, and it is from "beauty's rose," as Shakespeare says, that "we
desire increase." If you shudder at the touch of a withered hand or at the
sight of a one-eyed cat, it is because you feel that they are a menace to
the established forms of life. You are unconsciously playing the part of
policeman for nature. You are the guardian of its traditions when you blush
at the glance of two eyes and shudder at the glance of one.

And yet it is not impossible to fall in love with the physically defective
and sincerely to believe that they are beautiful. Take that incident
mentioned by Descartes. He said that when he was a child he used to play
with a little girl who had a squint, and that to the end of his days he
liked people who squinted. In this case it was the associations of memory
that gave a glamour to deformity and made it beautiful. The squint brought
back to him the memory of the Golden Age, and through the mist of that
memory it was transmuted into loveliness.

Nor is it memory alone that will work the miracle. Intellectual sympathy
will do it, too. Wilkes was renowned for his ugliness, but he claimed that,
given half an hour's start, he would win the smiles of any woman against
any competitor. And when one of his lady admirers, engaged in defending
him, was reminded that he squinted badly, she replied: "Of course he does;
but he doesn't squint more than a man of his genius ought to squint." Nor
was it women alone whom the fellow fascinated. Who can forget the scene
when Tom Davies brought him into the company of Dr. Johnson, who hated
Wilkes' Radicalism, and would never willingly have consented to meet him?
For a time Johnson refused to unbend, but at last he could hold out no
longer, and fell a victim to the charm of Wilkes' talk.

In the same wa