PHYSIOGNOMIC CURIOSITIES. 65 



Zopyrus berated Socrates as if he had caught a pickpocket ; nay, the 

 Spartan Gerontes fined one of their kings for courting a thick-set lady, 

 because " they could not permit him to afflict the state with a race of 

 undersized princes." In the record of the battle of Platrea, a certain 

 Callicrates is mentioned simply because he was the fairest of all the 

 Greeks who fought on that day ; and Plutarch speaks of a slave whom 

 Nicias set free for winning the applause of all Athens in a play (or 

 religious festival), where he enacted the role of the Bacchus Methystes ; 

 and even more amazing is what Strabo tells us of one Philippus, who 

 joined in the expedition of Doricus against Erix, and who, after hav- 

 ing been slain and stripped by the people of Segeste, was taken up and 

 grandly buried by his foes, and long afterward worshiped as a demi- 

 god, on account of his great beauty. 



But the nil admirari is not always a voluntary virtue. De Lagny, 

 in his account of a visit to the eastern tribes of Circassia, describes the 

 horrible sight of a battle-field in the rocky valley of Halistan, where 

 the day before six Russian regiments had been routed by the Lesghian 

 mountaineers. " But the victory was dearly bought," says he ; " in 

 the bed of the river, and all along the northern shore, we found the 

 unburied bodies of the heroes who had died in defense of their coun- 

 try. R was overcome by the sight, and asked us to hurry on, 



but on the outskirts of a chestnut-grove, that shades the valley of a 

 tributary creek, he suddenly stopped, and soon we were all assembled 

 around the body of a Lesghian warrior, who had fallen, with a bullet 

 through his head, at the foot of a shattered tree. The man wore the 

 green scarf of his tribe, and, from the profusion of ornaments on his 

 belt and his neck, seemed to have been a chieftain among his com- 

 panions. Yet it was not his grotesque attire, nor his form, which was 

 that of a Hercules, which held us spellbound it was his face, a face 

 which in manly beauty exceeded anything Phidias or Thorwaldsen 

 ever expressed in marble. We stood around, almost immovable, as 

 men will before a phenomenon they may see once and no more. No 

 one spoke a word, till Surgeon Herbert, of the Chasseurs d'Afrique, 

 broke the silence ; baring his head " Hats off, messieurs ; void Vintage 

 de Dieu we stand before the image of God ! " 



The Duke de Rohan used to say that " it had pleased Providence 

 to put something between the eyes of a French cavalier which a ple- 

 beian could not look at without quailing." The guillotine seems to 

 have settled that difficulty, but it is true that there is an innate maj- 

 esty in some faces which commands the respect even of those who 

 would decline to recognize any other claims to superior rank, not ex- 

 cepting those of an established reputation. For some reason or other 

 possibly the all-pervading hypocrisy of our Western civilization 

 this vultus majestatis has almost become a monopoly of the Moham- 

 medan nations. During the revolt of the Wahabees, the commander 

 of the sectarian army had frequent occasion to notice the efficiency of 



TOL. XXII. 5 



