A SUNDAY IX CHEYNE ROW 229 



should look on one like faces ! I love honest laugh- 

 ter as I do sunlight, but not dishonest; most kinds 

 of dancing, too, but the St. Vitus kind, not at 

 all ! " 



If Carlyle had taken to the brush instead of to 

 the pen, he would probably have left a gallery of 

 portraits such as this century has not seen. In his 

 letters, journals, reminiscences, etc., for him to 

 mention a man is to describe his face, and with 

 what graphic pen-and-ink sketches they abound! 

 Let me extract a few of them. Here is Rousseau's 

 face, from "Heroes and Hero Worship:" "A high 

 but narrow- contracted intensity in it; bony brows; 

 deep, straight-set eyes, in which there is something 

 bewildered - looking, bewildered, peering with 

 lynx-eagerness; a face full of misery, even ignoble 

 misery, and also of an antagonism against that; 

 something mean, plebeian, there, redeemed only by 

 intensity / the face of what is called a fanatic, 

 a sadly contracted hero ! " Here a glimpse of Dan- 

 ton: "Through whose black brows and rude, flat- 

 tened face there looks a waste energy as of Her- 

 cules." Camille Desmoulins: "With the face of 

 dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with 

 genius, as if a naphtha lamp burned in it. " Through 

 Mirabeau's "shaggy, beetle- brows, and rough-hewn, 

 seamed, carbuncled face there look natural ugliness, 

 smallpox, incontinence, bankruptcy, and burning 

 fire of genius; like comet fire, glaring fuliginous 

 through murkiest confusions." 



On first meeting with John Stuart Mill he de- 



