This taste prevails alike in the harem and in the 
desert. Duperron relates that a young savage, wish¬ 
ing to attract his notice, took by stealth a bit of 
charcoal, which she reduced to powder in a corner, 
rubbed her cheeks with it, and then came back with 
a look of triumph, as if this application had rendered 
her beauty irresistible. 
Castellan, in his Letters on Greece, thus describes 
a Greek princess, whose portrait he painted at Con¬ 
stantinople. “ She was not,” he says, “ the ideal 
beauty I had pictured to myself. Her dark, pro¬ 
minent eyes were as bright as diamonds, but her 
blackened eyelashes spoiled their expression. Her 
eyebrows, joined by a line of paint, gave a kind of 
harshness to her look. Her small mouth and deep- 
coloured lips might be embellished with smiles, but 
I never had the pleasure to see them. Her cheeks 
were covered with a very dark rouge, and her face 
was disfigured by crescent-shaped patches. Add to 
this the lifelessness of her demeanour and the freezing 
gravity of her physiognomy, and you would suppose 
that I had been depicting an Italian-Madonna.” 
The Bugloss has been made the emblem of false¬ 
hood, because its root is employed in the composi¬ 
tion of various kinds of rouge ; and that of which it 
