onderfully beneficent, I am sure
indeed. Much, I have said, is already done for its full revival. The
spirit of the age has made straight the path of its professors. Fashion
has made Jezebel surrender her monopoly of the rouge-pot. As yet, the
great art of self-embellishment is for us but in its infancy. But if
Englishwomen can bring it to the flower of an excellence so supreme as
never yet has it known, then, though Old England lose her martial and
commercial supremacy, we patriots will have the satisfaction of knowing
that she has been advanced at one bound to a place in the councils
of aesthetic Europe. And, in sooth, is this hoping too high of my
countrywomen? True that, as the art seems always to have appealed to the
ladies of Athens, and it was not until the waning time of the Republic
that Roman ladies learned to love the practice of it, so Paris, Athenian
in this as in all other things, has been noted hitherto as a far more
vivid centre of the art than London. But it was in Rome, under the
Emperors, that unguentaria reached its zenith, and shall it not be in
London, soon, that unguentaria shall outstrip its Roman perfection!
Surely there must be among us artists as cunning in the use of brush
and puff as any who lived at Versailles. Surely the splendid, impalpable
advance of good taste, as shown in dress and in the decoration of
houses, may justify my hope of the preeminence of Englishwomen in the
cosmetic art. By their innate delicacy of touch they will accomplish
much, and much, of course, by their swift feminine perception. Yet it
were well that they should know something also of the theoretical side
of the craft. Modern authorities upon the mysteries of the toilet are,
it is true, rather few; but among the ancients many a writer would seem
to have been fascinated by them. Archigenes, a man of science at the
Court of Cleopatra, and Criton at the Court of the Emperor Trajan, both
wrote treatises upon cosmetics--doubtless most scholarly treatises that
would have given many a precious hint. It is a pity they are not extant.
From Lucian or from Juvenal, with his bitter picture of a Roman levee,
much may be learnt; from the staid pages of Xenophon and Aristophanes'
dear farces. But best of all is that fine book of the Ars Amatoria that
Ovid has set aside for the consideration of dyes, perfumes, and
pomades. Written by an artist who knew the allurement of the toilet and
understood its philosophy, it remains without r