and the painter has followed him. Judas, in many of the early Italian pictures, is seen biting his under lip. Richard III., as portrayed by Holinshed and by Shakspeare, had a similar habit. Men of nervous and excitable temperament have, especially if suspicious, a habit of plucking at their lips and distorting their mouths.

Small mouths are very much praised, and have been for a long time much in fashion. Fashionable painters and artists for the Book of Beauty have carried this smallness of mouth to an absurdity. You will see engravings of ladies with mouths considerably smaller than their eyes, which, of course, presuming the face to be in due proportion, is as much a monstrosity as if the mouth, like that of a giant in a pantomime, extended from ear to ear. The female mouth should not be too small. From what we can gather from contemporary portraits, supposing them to be true, both Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots had mouths much too small to be handsome. That of the former, the greatest female monarch who has ever existed, should have at least indicated her capacious mind. That of Queen Charlotte was ugly ; that of the princess of that name was a true Brunswick mouth, exhibiting the two front teeth, from the shortness and curious elevation of the upper lip, which is perpetuated in the males of the present royal family. The House of Hapsburg has also a very ugly mouth, celebrated as the Austrian mouth.

Certain masters of the ceremonies have written much on the expression of the mouth. "It is," says one, "the feature which is called into play the most frequently; and therefore,

even where beauty of form exists, careful training is needed, to enable it to perform correctly its manifold duties. An elegant manner of utterance renders words, insignificant in themselves, agreeable and persuasive. In the act of eating, skilful management is necessary. A laugh is a very severe

test to this feature."

Turning from such foppery to the poets, we may conclude by saying that, from the Greek anthology downwards, to the fluent young fellows who write songs for the music-publishers, thousands of lines have been written in praise of ladies' mouths. The Latins and the Italians have paid great attention to this feature: rosy lips, pearly teeth, and violet breath, have been for ages the stock-in-trade of the poets. But perhaps the best things said of them are by an Irish and an English poet: the Irishman, hyperbolically, likens the mouth of his charmer to "a dish of strawberries smothered in crame;" and Sir John Suckling paints to the life the pretty pouting under lip of a beauty in his Ballad on a Wedding:

"Her lips were red, and one was thin;
Compared to that was next her chin-

Some bee had stung it newly."

THE POOR ABOUT US.

T must be admitted that we live in very comfortable times; that is, for the rich and the wellto-do. The baron of old, with whom romantic young ladies sometimes fall in imaginative love, was not half so well off as regards "creature comforts" as the small tradesman of to-day. The duke in King Richard's days never wore such linen, such comfortable shoes, or dined upon such excellent mutton and vegetables as the man of the middle classes of to-day. His house was not so well ventilated, his windows did not give so much light, his person was not so safe, as that of a little provincial attorney, who, by the necessity of his position, is forced to spend his useful life in fomenting petty quarrels, and gathering therefrom sixand-eightpences. Nor was the baron's castle so well guarded. Around the attorney, and around every other subject of the Queen, is drawn a powerful and a magic circle, called the Majesty of the Law, which must not be transgressed, and to guard which, inviolate and untouched, twenty-six millions of British subjects are ready to die. As regards actual comfort, plenty, food, warmth, clothing, travelling, and all the little

happinesses of life, there is absolutely no choice; the bold baron, shivering in his windy castle, with the edges of his eyes red with the smoke of his wood or his peat fire, is absolutely nowhere: the benefits are all on the side of the tradesman, or attorney, or middle-class man of modern society, who, having done very little towards the good of others, is yet borne upwards as the mass moves, and gathers all the benefits of the workers and thinkers of the past.

Such a reflection as this is enough to make us thankful and prayerful, even if we are not very great, or rich, or clever. But there is another side of the question, which should make us more so. Certain portions of society are very much better off; but there are others which are perhaps worse. There is a ragged fringe on the robe of society, woven though it be in purple and gold and silver tissue, and of many glorious colours, which should make us shudder whilst we think of it. Let us take London, the largest and richest city in the world, and see what we find there.

In London alone we have, we are told, 16,000 children trained to crime; 15,000 lazy, hulking men, too cowardly to be desperate, who live by "cadging" and low gambling. There are no fewer than 5000 receivers of stolen goods, and 150,000 men and women subsisting by other disgraceful means, which we will not here mention. To hang on to these, and to the charity of well-to-do persons (and perhaps the rogues are the more profuse of the two), we have 25,000 beggars; and these, all added together, will make a very large army, composed of what Carlyle calls the "devil's regi

ments of the line," of more than 261,000 persons! "These," says Mr. George Godwin, in his last book, called, pathetically, Another Blow for Life, “are terrible figures ;" and let us remember that there can be no question as to the fact. Some statisticians would make the aggregate less by 50,000 or so ; some might swell it to more; but, less or more, there is the fact-terrible, startling, appalling. Can it, or some part of it, be remedied?

None of our readers who have caught the true spirit of these Essays can suppose that we have any object before us save that of doing what little good we can in our generation; nor, in doing this, will they imagine that for a moment we could be so injudicious as to array class against class. But when we look downwards, below our own class, we find infinite subdivisions more or less neglected and more or less miserable. The Almighty has decreed that the poor shall never cease out of the land; nevertheless, he has commanded that they shall be tended and cared for in their painful pilgrimage. In following out our own material success, in pushing forward the mighty power of this kingdom, and in developing its astonishing resources, the working classes have often been overlooked, though they have never been wholly forgotten.

In London, for instance, to which the above figures apply, the house-room is woefully insufficient. Through overcrowding, imperfect ventilation, and consequent bad air, both the mind and the body become vitiated. Sydney Godolphin Osborne and The Times newspaper, in excusing Sir George