306 BEAUTY. 



bodily tokens of vice or criminality — the horrid 

 bloated face of the habitual drunkard, the un- 

 wholesome j)imply countenance of the dissipated 

 young man, the liard, cruel, unlovely features of 

 the most degraded men and women in our worst 

 neglected slums and purlieus. Lowest of all and 

 most liideous of all are the characteristic criminal 

 types — the bullet-headed, bull-necked men with 

 low receding foreheads, horrible flat, broad, coarse 

 noses, large, heavy, projecting under jaws, cruel, 

 crafty, sensuous eyes, and a general slouch of gait 

 and manner which at once bespeaks the slinking 

 attitude of mind and body of the habitual enemy 

 of society. Such men inspire us at once with 

 horror and loathing. To this lowest and most 

 degraded type of all alone do we riglitly apply 

 the epithet "hideous." liideousness, in fact, 

 implies always something of instinctive moral dis- 

 gust as well as of mere i)hysical repulsion. If 

 anybody doubts, indeed, whether the sense of 

 beauty is intended by Nature as a guiding light to 

 us in our choice of partners and associates in life, 

 he has only to look at these worst instances, and 

 he will feel at once how instinctively car very 

 eyes and senses warn us against them at first 

 sight. It is of course true, as moralists have long 

 told us, that a pretty fjice is not everything ; but 

 iFTO also equally true that it is not nothing either. 

 It tells us a great deal that is worth knowing 



